Providence is now home to the state’s first Real-Time Crime Center, aiming to support the city’s policing efforts with real-time surveillance technology and data, Providence officials announced last month.
But the new center — which uses public and registered private security cameras, license plate readers and 911 call data to monitor crime — has drawn criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, an individual rights advocacy group.
On Aug. 21, the ACLU R.I. made public a letter addressed to Mayor Brett Smiley and Police Chief Oscar Perez, describing the center as “an all-encompassing surveillance system” and expressing concerns about the lack of explicit privacy safeguards on the data collected for the center…