{"id":7657,"date":"2021-12-13T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-13T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/?p=7657"},"modified":"2021-12-10T16:30:45","modified_gmt":"2021-12-10T21:30:45","slug":"today-testify-against-funding-bric-surveillance-tech-militarized-policing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/2021\/12\/13\/today-testify-against-funding-bric-surveillance-tech-militarized-policing\/","title":{"rendered":"Today: Testify against\u00a0funding BRIC, surveillance tech &#038; militarized policing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.boston.gov\/public-notices\/15774881\">Today at 1pm, the Boston Public Safety and Criminal Justice committee<\/a> will consider whether to &#8220;<em>accept and expend the amount of Thirteen Million Five Hundred Twenty Thousand Dollars ($13,520,000.00) in the form of a grant for the Federal FY21 Urban Areas Security Initiative, awarded by the United States Department of Homeland Security<\/em>&#8220;. This funding includes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>$2,828,000 for funding the Boston Regional Information Center (BRIC) so often used to keep tabs on or surpressing peaceful protesters;<\/li><li>$850,000 for regional training and exercises. It isn&#8217;t clear what the training or exercises will focus on, but it can be expected to focus on militarized police activities and not on deescalation and peaceful police-citizen interactions;<\/li><li>$695,000 for SWAT team regional funding. More for militarized policing;<\/li><li>$315,000 for \u201cGunshot Detection\u201d, which is presumably a&nbsp;\u201cShotSpotter\u201d contract. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vice.com\/en\/article\/qj8xbq\/police-are-telling-shotspotter-to-alter-evidence-from-gunshot-detecting-ai?utm_source=reddit.com\">ShotSpotter has recently been been found to falsify &#8220;shot&#8221; reports at the prompting of police<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/thecrimereport.org\/2021\/08\/30\/chicagos-shotspotter-misses-gunfire-manipulates-police-behavior-report\/\">useless surveillance technology<\/a>;<\/li><li>$168,000 for \u201cBriefCam,\u201d software the processes surveillance camera recordins, and makes it searchable.&nbsp;BPD\u2019s use of this software&nbsp; likely conflicts with the City\u2019s ban on the use of facial recognition software;<\/li><li>$10,000 for a regional automated license plate reader (ALPR) system.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Boston previously&nbsp;rejected $850,000 in state funding for BRIC and it can reject this money as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Written testimony may be sent to the <a href=\"mailto:ccc.ps@boston.gov\">Committee email<\/a> or to&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/mailto:michelle.a.goldberg@boston.gov\"><\/a><a href=\"mailto:michelle.a.goldberg@boston.gov\">Michelle A. Goldberg<\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/mailto:michelle.a.goldberg@boston.gov\"><\/a> and will be made a part of the record and available to all Councilors. Members of the public wishing to testify virtually via videoconference should email <a href=\"mailto:michelle.a.goldberg@boston.gov\">Michelle A. Goldberg<\/a> for a link and instructions for how to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The hearing will be streamed at: <a href=\"http:\/\/boston.gov\/city-council-tv\">boston.gov\/city-council-tv<\/a> and broadcast on Xfinity 8\/RCN 82\/Fios 964.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Thanks to <a href=\"https:\/\/warrantless.org\/\">Digital Fourth<\/a> for bringing this hearing to our attention.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today at 1pm, the Boston Public Safety and Criminal Justice committee will consider whether to &#8220;accept and expend the amount of Thirteen Million&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1626,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30,59,32,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-civil-liberties","category-criminal-justice","category-slider","category-surveillance"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/camera-de-surveillance.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1W8mg-1Zv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7657"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7658,"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7657\/revisions\/7658"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}