Surveillance Camera Players writes:

Staggering Increase of Surveillance Cameras in Chinatown
Surveillance Camera Players

In New York City, "Chinatown" is a legendary, small, and very densely populated neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. Originally centered around Mott Street below Canal Street, Chinatown has expanded a great deal since the 19th century, and now reaches as far west as Centre Street and as far east as Essex Street, and may be the last great ("real") neighborhood in New York. For a New Yorker, any subway with a "Canal Street" stop means Chinatown. The area is a popular attraction for both tourists and locals because of its "atmosphere" and inexpensive restaurants, food markets, and shops of all kinds.Up until recently, Chinatown had very few surveillance cameras installed in or watching over public places (streets, sidewalks, doorsteps, alleys, and parks). The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) only found 13 "public" cameras when it mapped the area in the fall of 1998. When we, the Surveillance Camera Players, scouted the area in August 2001, we only found 30 such cameras, which we judged to be too few to warrant making a map.

In the summer of 2002, a man named Rob Chin made a map that displays how many surveillance cameras he found in Chinatown. According to our count (Chin doesn't provide a total), he found 82 cameras: 58 "CCTV" cameras (presumably these are privately owned); 23 installed on or near ATM machines (also privately owned); and 1 installed on a city-owned pole by the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT).

In June 2004, we linked up with a volunteer from the NYCLU, which is again taking up the issue of the video surveillance of public places; together, we started a brand-new map of Chinatown. According to our research, which required 10 hours of work, there are now 605 surveillance cameras in Chinatown: 565 installed on or pointing out of privately owned buildings; 38 installed on city, state or federal government buildings; and 2 installed by the DOT on city-owned poles.

This means that, over the course of the last two years, the number of surveillance cameras in Chinatown has increased seven times over; and that, over the last six years, the number has increased forty-five times over! There are more cameras in Chinatown than any other neighborhood that we have ever mapped out: the next highest (510 cameras) would be NYU.

What accounts for the utterly spectacular increase of video surveillance in Chinatown? Fear, certainly: fear — usually artificially created — is always the reason people pay for, install, maintain and record the feeds from surveillance cameras: fear of "crime" (crimes of opportunity and organized crime), of international terrorism, employee theft, hard-ball insurance companies, inspectors from the Police, Sanitation or Health Departments, etc etc. But crime is down in Chinatown, as it is all over New York City, one of the safest cities in America. And yet, unlike other neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan, Chinatown continues to be economically depressed as a result of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the near-by World Trade Center. Manufacturers that took flight haven't returned; unemployment is twice the city-wide average; there's a severe housing shortage and an increasing problem with homelessness.

As for the immense increase in the numbers of government/police/DOT cameras in Chinatown (from 1 to 40), September 11th is certainly the justification. In the aftermath of the attacks, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) created a permanently temporary "secure zone" all the way around its headquarters at One Police Plaza. No doubt heeding warnings from its new counter-terrorism chief, former CIA agent David Cohen, the NYPD forced the closure of a couple of small near-by streets, including Park Row, which — in addition to going right by (through an underpass next to) One Police Plaza — provided critical north-south connections between Chinatown and the rest of Lower Manhattan (Broadway, Wall Street, the WTC) and, via the the Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn. And so the police have sealed the southern gateway to Chinatown, which can now only be reached from its already-congested northern (the Bowery) and western (Canal Street) sides. The NYPD also stopped bus and garbage-removal service on Park Row, and, as far north as Kimlau Square, have filled it with reinforced-concrete barriers, military-style checkpoints, and — you guessed it — surveillance cameras.

(The NYPD seems utterly convinced that terrorists seeking revenge for the US military's war against and occupation of Iraq will eventually target One Police Plaza. Given the facts that former NYPD Commission Bernard Kerik was once in charge of training Baghdad's police force, and that Iraq's police forces have been a favorite target of the insurgents in Iraq, the NYPD's concern seems justified and sensible. Unless, of course, the terrorists use an airplane, instead of a truck-bomb, to attack the building. . ..)

Trapped within this very menacing insecurity zone are two major apartment blocks, the Chatham Green and Chatham Towers, the residents of which are almost entirely Chinese. Every day they are watched by globe-shaped, high-powered video cameras and armed, non-Chinese-speaking officers at "security check-points" where everyone must show ID if they are asked.

A good indication of the NYPD's attitude towards the residents of Chatham/Chinatown can be found in the recent history of James Madison Plaza, which used to exist on a 0.361-acre triangle of land just south of Chatham Towers. Named after the fourth President of the USA, the Plaza had been under the jurisdiction of the New York City Parks Department since 1964, though it wasn't until the late 1970s that the Parks Department planted more than 30 trees and furnished tables and benches. Sometime after September 11th, so that their officers could have adequate parking for their private cars, the NYPD seized possession of, "cleared" (destroyed) everything and paved over James Madison Plaza. In a lawsuit ruled upon in August 2003, the NYPD were ordered to remove their vehicles, which they finally did — without re-planting the trees or providing new tables and benches — in April 2004.

A similar lawsuit has just been filed over the NYPD's occupation of Park Row. Back in August 2003, the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, was quoted as saying, "I'm a big believer that if you keep people from moving around reasonably freely, if you take away people's personal rights in the interest of security, the terrorists win without firing a shot." We'll see if he means what he said, because the terrorists appear to be winning on Park Row. Never before — not even in the darkest days of the anti-Communist paranoia of the 1950s or the anti-opium hysteria of the early 1900s — has Chinatown been confronted with such a open display of insensitivity, suspicion and armed force.