By Ben Stegbauer
I recently moved out of New York City and back to the Midwest and into Suburbia. If you look at recent headlines in New York City you will see that the Governor of New York has sent the National Guard into the subway systems. Along with this surveillance, specific targeting of Palestine Liberation protests have been nothing but out of control. There is nothing new and shocking to the news that we live in a surveillance state. That Cop Cities are being built in order to infiltrate any protest movement and to suppress them. That there is propaganda galore about radical leftist terrorists that need to be oppressed and stomped out of our country. After all, this was the exact response many conservative members of congress had to the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell.
I start with the first sentence to say that while in some ways there is a very direct and expected correlation between a heavy police and surveillance presence and a place like New York City, people don’t expect it as much in a place like Midwestern Cincinnati. But I have found that it pokes its face out just as much.
Going to the grocery store recently has felt like a dystopian hell. Kroger clearly has been trying to reduce the number of cashiers so everyone is forced into “self-checkout” lines that all have overhead cameras that more than often interrupt your check-out process, accusing you of stealing if you don’t put the scanned items down in the exact right way the camera wants you to. A disgruntled employee comes over and has to override the system. Two weeks ago one of the employees even exclaimed “this would be easier if Big Brother wasn’t watching.” We both laughed as a scene replayed over and over again of a bell pepper falling off the bagging shelf onto the floor.
Of course, I am also mad about this overhead camera because I am publicly forced to face how bald I am getting on a replay highlight film in front of a stranger and seven people waiting for me to be finished so they can check out too. Conversely this Wired article points out how Wal-Mart anti-shoplifting technology simply doesn’t work. It seems Wal-Mart and Kroger both use the same Irish surveillance video company, Everseen Visual AI. And even less technology dependent anti-shoplifting technologies make shopping nowadays an elongated chore. Even in New York I remember having to push a buzzer for an employee to unlock the door so I could pick a flavor of $4 ice cream at Rite-Aid. Of course, you feel like your privacy is being invaded because the employee has to stand right next to you waiting to re-lock the fridge door once you are done. And often these “theft-prevention” practices are more methodical and insidious than simply “stopping theft.” I’ve seen a lot more talk online recently about how Target tracks shoplifters and waits to prosecute once they have stolen enough for it to count as a felony.
Of course, Kroger also utilizes other anti-shoplifting tactics that are simply depressing if not infuriating. For at least the past six or so years (maybe more than my memory serves me) they have started placing certain items in a closed off section of the store. These certain items are: personal hygiene products, laundry detergent, and baby formula. In order to purchase an item from this part of the store you have to check out before leaving the area and then still go to self-checkout for the rest of your items. Of course the amount of items in this sectioned off part of the store, is greatly determined by the racial and class make up of the neighborhood clientele. Further, in my experience these closed-off sections do not even exist in the white upper middle class suburban stores. I just cannot even begin to truly talk about the outrage that in very intentionally specific parts of the country (that are already over-policed) you have to go to a certain section of the grocery store and then ask a specific cashier to hand you a container of baby formula, because they are so concerned that you are going to shoplift it. How board members and high level managers can put out reports about measures to curb “the grave injustice” of baby formula shoplifting and then simply go home and get a nice eight hours of sleep is beyond me.
Anyway, this is going too far from what I originally wanted to reflect on. This rant is now about anti-shoplifting measures and surveillance in grocery stores, and while egregious and rage-inducing, I originally set out writing this article to reflect on this concept of “safety” and its relation to surveillance and propaganda.
I recently had an experience that flustered me, puzzled me, and enraged me. I like to ride the bus to work. And catching the bus from where I do, at the end of the line, I am often the only one on when I get on. It was a recent move, so I haven’t taken the bus too too many times from this stop. It is a suburban express bus so it spends some time on the highway and it rarely ever gets more than seven people riding. Anyway, when I got on about a week back, I was the only person on. About two minutes after I had sat down the driver yells back to me, “oh, by chance were you wearing a mask?” I was, and then she said, “oh, can you take it down for a couple seconds so the camera can know who you are?” I then asked “why do I have to do this?” She then said it was “for her safety as the driver, so they knew who I am in case anything happened.”
I felt put into an incredibly awkward position. If I refused, that would be incredibly suspicious and make the driver feel as if I was actually a danger to her. I was not unaware of the gender and racial dynamics at play as a medium built white man. What am I supposed to do? I don’t want to pull my mask down and let my face get recognized just so one person can feel safer. I was already two pages into my book, minding my own business when this happened, and just wanted a peaceful ride. But also, the driver is insisting that it is for her physical safety and her sense of safety. I just want to take the bus, not get into a fight or truly be surveilled.
This incident happened about a week ago now (maybe more by the time of publishing) and I can’t stop thinking about it. I am not sure if the Metro buses here utilize facial recognition technology or not. Perhaps only when needed. I know there are growing reports of the New York City metro systems’ cameras leading to arrests for outstanding warrants. But I simply keep asking myself and reflecting on this driver patting their chest and saying “it is for my safety.” I keep on reflecting on that word “safety.” In reality, it is a word I use often and I use seriously. Everyone deserves to feel safe, and it seems that actually should be the lowest bar. But how do we go about achieving this safety? Do we all become some various level of cop? Even if we don’t wear a badge do we all take on the part-time job of becoming a cop? It seems more and more that every job requires people to be some degree of cop to their neighbors.
I recently came across an article and study about child abuse numbers during the pandemic. I remember being slightly shocked to read these findings. Well, because as the articles state, there was a lot of concern in those early days of 2020 about the “shadow pandemic” of child abuse going on in homes where children, women, and other vulnerable people would be locked inside with people with abusive tendencies, but this supposed big bump never happened. The articles actually end up citing pandemic era financial supports. It was the same financial supports that lifted forty percent of children out of poverty that also kept them safe from the abusive people in their lives. Studies show over all that “crime” rates dropped during the beginning of the pandemic, possibly showing a similar correlation to the studies above in connection to the pandemic stimulus packages. It is important to note here and remember that while all of these trends were interacting with each other, George Floyd was still murdered by the police, and there was a lot of police violence as a result of the uprisings in the following months.
So what does this mean for our conception and reality of safety? What I find interesting is that the bus driver, the NYC metro cameras, the National Guard, and so many other facets of our society seem to derive a completely different definition of “safety.” A good friend of mine was recently talking about how it seems our societal definition of “safety” simply means the assurance that any assailant would get arrested. Even if all of the harm was already done.
The aforementioned studies dispute this claim and I think we even know it to be true. Why would we simply hold fast to arresting people and calling that safety, instead of diving deeper. How do we actually create a society that pursues safety to its furthest extent? Perhaps I was intrigued to write this here, because this pursuit feels like a spiritual task. It forces us to realize and consider how we sit in relation to each other. To interrogate the ways in which we demand safety and the ways that could lead to injustice, harm, and surveillance for others, especially our Black and Brown neighbors, our houseless neighbors, and our neighbors with disabilities. It also seems to be a spiritual act to deconstruct the relationship between safety and illegality. Perhaps even sitting with ourselves and examining when our feelings of unsafety are informed by the racist, classist, and ableist foundation of our society. While reflecting on writing for this piece I could not help but feel this whole endeavor had some inherent spiritual flavor to it. And to get cheesy and “on the nose” for a second, that doing some of this spiritual work, that simultaneously helps us to interrogate ourselves while also interrogating our society’s refusal to meet everyone’s needs, can help us to be in better solidarity with each other.
In the end, sitting on the bus, I took down my mask. Perhaps I was so shocked in the moment and I did not want to start a fight, or I did not even know how much of a fight it would be. Or I did not know how to wade through the awkwardness of pleading with someone that you aren’t a threat to them. After all, I just wanted to ride the bus to work. I ended up confused and angry enough the rest of the bus ride that I tried to research whether this request was even legal. I couldn’t quite find anything. Just that the Metro Buses use high tech security cameras “for everyone’s safety.” It also at times feels hopeless. If the cameras are nearly as good as they can be, if I pull down my mask even once during the ride to take a sip of water, perhaps they have my face then anyway. I want to be more prepared next time in order to refuse. Or perhaps I could even push city council to put up signs at least informing people their faces are being recorded. But alas I don’t know, I just like to ride the bus to work.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7awa/this-hacker-hoodie-uses-surveillance-camera-parts-to-blind-surveillance-cameras
There's a few of these kinds of garms around. And yes, attitude to risk is messed up.
"But alas I don’t know, I just like to ride the bus to work." That's the point, completely. We all just want to live in peace.