Howard Wolfson on post-9/11 Privacy and Security in Urban America

Howard Wolfson is a Democratic political strategist who holds a B.A. from the University of Chicago and an M.A. from Duke University. He has served as the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and communications director for the US Senate campaigns of Charles Schumer, Hillary Clinton, and Ned Lamont. Most recently, Wolfson served as Deputy Mayor of New York City for governmental affairs.

How did the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 alter the privacy/security balance in New York City, and does increasing one necessarily diminish the other?

I think that it changed the discussion internationally, nationally, and locally. I flew yesterday and was again struck by the process of taking your shoes off, placing your bag in the conveyer, going through a machine that has some sort of 3D imaging of your body, placing your hands above your head, waiting to get the all-clear, and thinking how unusual this would have been before 9/11.

As a society, we’ve made a determination that we could never allow something like 9/11 to happen again, and I think most Americans became comfortable with a level of security measures that might have seemed quite intrusive to a previous generation. I think at the local level in New York, there was a determination that the federal government had sort of let us down prior to 9/11. There was a determination at the local level that we should take steps within our ability to protect ourselves.

There is this trend of cities looking around and recognizing they’re on their own. So I see this balance between privacy and security as one that’s played out globally, nationally, and locally.

There’s been a lot of discussion on this topic with respect to the NSA, but something that has been less reported on is the proliferation of street cameras across urban centers. In Chicago, essentially the entire downtown area and most public transit are under near-constant video surveillance. Is this a positive development, and where do local governments or any governments draw the line?

This really proliferated first in Europe. Europe began the CCTV (closed-circuit television) trend, and in London they were placed to prevent and deal with terrorism from Ireland as far back as the ’70s. Technology is obviously much more sophisticated now, and if you don’t really think that there are people in the world who are coming to kill us, you may think that this is overly intrusive and unnecessary. If you think that there are people who wish us harm and that these cameras might deter or catch them, you probably think it’s okay. I still think a lot of New Yorkers are concerned that there are people who wish us harm.

That’s reasonable, but what about when the aim becomes pretty explicitly to reduce street crime, rather than terrorism. At what point is it acceptable to use surveillance technology to compensate for failures in public safety?

So the question is: “is surveillance technology compensating for failures in public safety, or is it a legitimate public safety tool that augments other public safety strategies?” No mayor would last very long if their public safety strategy was “cut police and add TV.” I think people see it as a tool. In New York we’re having a debate, and you’ve had it here [in Chicago], around red light cameras and speed cameras, and our police union doesn’t want them because they think that they might reduce the number of police, which I think is rather preposterous. And there are some people who think it’s their God-given right to speed as long as they’re not caught, and I don’t really agree with that.

I’m not sure you have a Constitutional right to break the law and get away with it. If there are ways in which the police can identify people who are engaged in criminal or dangerous behaviors, without violating people’s Fourth Amendment rights, they should do that. And I realize all of this is subject to the prevailing legal views of the moment, and what might now be an appropriate search and seizure might not have been appropriate 30, 40, 50, or 100 years ago

I return to the notion that people are willing to tolerate certain things depending on their sense of the threat. Nobody is willing, I think, for police to be able to come without a warrant and search your house. For most Americans, that would be a very clear violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. But I think people have largely accepted that when they are on the street, which is a public conveyance, that there’s going to be CCTV.

Also, our whole notion of privacy has been changed by social media anyway. Especially folks of your generation, I think, have a very different expectation about what constitutes private behavior and what constitutes public behavior. I think there’s a growing sense that if you’re going to engage in some activity outside of your room, there is every expectation that it could be on social media the next day. So given that, are we really going to turn away from police strategies that presumably help deter and solve crime?

You mentioned that people would not be comfortable having the police come and search their home without reason, but doesn’t the Constitution grant that same right to a person on the street? Why is it okay to detain and search a person without probable cause under “Stop and Frisk,” especially given that New York has become one of the safer big cities in America?

What you saw in the last election is that there were people who were unhappy with what they perceived to be the overuse of Stop and Frisk, and a mayor was elected who promised to severely cut back on it. So our politics does have a way of addressing these issues. If people are unhappy with something, they do have the opportunity to seek change or redress at the ballot box.

This issue was controversial. We believed that it was Constitutional and effective at reducing crime. There were obviously people who disagreed with us on both counts. We had actually begun to significantly reduce the number in our last year, and obviously the number remains reduced, and we will continue to see what the results are.

I don’t think the issue was ever really the number, though. I’m sure that was part of it, and it certainly contributed to the election result. But on a more fundamental level, the question is really can you stop someone who has otherwise not done anything wrong for essentially “looking suspicious?”

Well I think the police would argue that they weren’t stopping people who were looking suspicious. They were stopping people who met descriptions of people who had committed crimes or people who were acting in a way that aroused suspicion.

But isn’t that still extremely subjective?

Well, policing is subjective. And I think there are good people on both sides of this issue. I reject this sort of 1970s notion that the job of the police is to respond when they get the 911 call. You need proactive policing.

Again, I think there are some generational issues here. When I was your age, crime was out of control. In fact, when I was driving here today, I drove past the alley in which a guy held a gun to my head when I was in college, and that was not totally unusual. People decided they didn’t want to live like that.

And the majority of victims of gun violence in urban areas are African-Americans: 90 percent of the perpetrators and 90 percent of the victims. So to some degree, you had a community that was tired of living in fear of guns and violence, and, to be fair, there are obviously people who didn’t like the remedy, and they were certainly heard in the last election.

I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not a judge, so I see a lot of this stuff as playing out in a political context. I think courts sometimes lead public opinion; sometimes they react to public opinion. You’d like to think that the Constitution is this immutable document set in stone that Moses brought down from the Mount, but that’s not how it plays out in the real world.

Feature Photo: cc/(Henning Mühlinghaus)