by MICHAEL-OLIVER HARDING

This week, Montreal police will launch Phase 3 of the Robot-Cam surveillance project. Following trial runs on St-Denis in both 2004 and 2005, St-Laurent will become the second street on the island to be decked with cameras during a trial period from July 1–October 31.

According to police, the additional surveillance will help “to reduce criminality and increase the sense of security among residents and tourists.” On top of 12 new cameras on the Main between Sherbrooke and Duluth, the project will also entail “an intensification of that kind of police intervention on St-Denis between Ste-Catherine and Ontario,” says Inspector Sylvain Lemay.

“There will be additional cameras, and the observation time will increase, because the first phases of Robot-Cam delivered very satisfying results,” he says, claiming that these results include a 33 per cent drop in criminality rates on certain stretches of St-Denis.

Robot-Cam under scrutiny

But many groups view these statistics as unsubstantiated. The government-based Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec (CAI) released a less than glowing report in April 2005 that concluded the SPVM had not justified its use of video surveillance. The CAI also criticized police for not respecting the time limit set for preserving footage, angling the cameras in a way that infringed on the residents’ private lives, and failing to prove that other less intrusive measures had been considered. Moreover, the CAI slammed the police for not consulting any community organizations in the area about the project.

Two such groups worry about the cameras’ impact on their target clientele—marginalized communities such as drug users, sex workers and homeless youth. Johanne Fradette of Cactus Montréal contends that the cameras merely move undesired behaviours a few blocks over, instead of confronting social ills head on. “What happens then is that youths move into more residential areas where they can go about their business,” says Fradette. For her part, Jennifer Clamen of Stella claims that video surveillance sets certain protected communities against more vulnerable ones, thus fostering a false sense of security. She also calls into question what the police refer to as criminality. “What kind of criminality are they looking for? Is it the kind that would catch someone committing a violent act against a sex worker? I highly doubt it.”

Prosecution or prevention?

The ongoing debate over the use of video surveillance has many wondering just how effective the equipment can be in preventing crime. Crime rates in the world’s most watched nation—Great Britain has more than four million CCTV peeping devices in over 500 towns—are consistently among the highest of all industrialized nations. While studies on surveillance technology’s efficacy in deterring crime are inconclusive at best, a more tangible measure of its impact are countless cases in which video footage has played a determining role in identifying and convicting suspects. Just turn back the clock to July 21 of last year: One day after the botched bomb attacks in London, video footage of the four men on the run was released and the suspects were quickly apprehended.

But what does this all mean for the Main, a hotspot for festivals, tourists and lewd behaviour in the weeks ahead? While Inspector Lemay says that “Robot-Cam aims to counter the proliferation of street gangs above Sherbrooke and reduce the sale of narcotics below,” Gordon Bernstein of the Société de développement du boulevard St-Laurent singles out vandalism as the Main’s greatest challenge. He is confident in the cameras’ ability to dissuade people from defacing public property. “Just look at Ex-Centris,” he says. “They have cameras around the building, and I rarely hear about acts of vandalism committed there.”

Bernstein understands how organizations such as Cactus and Stella are concerned with the possibility of cameras being used against certain marginalized groups, but says St-Laurent is an entirely different ball game. “In our neighbourhood, the presence of these groups is quite small. It’s a residential area, and graffiti and scratchiti (etchings of tags into store windows) are really the only things we can whine about. It’s very expensive and damaging, and I think people are just fed up with the vandalism around here.”