The Charleston People's Budget Coalition released the following statement in response to community support for the City of North Charleston’s plan to purchase and install 750 cameras after a shooting occurred near a youth baseball game at Pepperhill Park:
“The Charleston People's Budget Coalition acknowledges there are members of the North Charleston community who are in support of the ‘mass surveillance’ Joint Operations Center (JOC) initiative because they sincerely want to see an end to gun violence and crime in their communities. However, it is our belief that this is not a substantive solution and that if our communities were presented with other options they would choose them.
The narrative being put forth by the local government is that increased policing and surveillance makes our communities safer, but we know that is not the case. Law enforcement budgets have steadily increased over the years and this has done nothing to curb crime. The City of North Charleston allocates a third of its budget to law enforcement and rather than reduce crime, according to the North Charleston Police Department Racial Bias Audit, NCPD officers are using our tax dollars to disproportionately stop, interrogate, arrest, use force against Black residents ‘at substantially higher rates than their presence in the North Charleston population.’
The JOC will only exacerbate these disparities, without reducing crime, based on evidence from cities across the country that have implemented similar initiatives. Our communities are being aggressively gentrified and under-resourced. We are in an affordable housing crisis and North Charleston is the eviction capital of America. We have little to no access to healthy foods, our communities are polluted, our infrastructure is old and outdated, our schools aren't meeting our needs and we aren't being paid living wages. We are forced into socio-economic situations where our youth see little option but to fight over the scraps the city throws our way. We often don't understand the connection between our current living conditions and our history of slavery, racism, Jim Crow segregation, mass incarceration, the war on drugs and ethnic cleansing.
Unfortunately, the local government presents us with very few alternatives other than increased policing and surveillance to solve the problems the government itself has created from centuries of neglect. As a coalition we know that investing in life-affirming services creates safer communities. Our youth need access to quality education, culturally relevant curriculum, afterschool and summer school programs, community and recreational centers, job training and employment opportunities, health care and living wages. Therefore, we suggest allocating the 2.5 million of our tax dollars that has been proposed for the JOC go toward partnering with local training schools to provide scholarships instead. Rather than create additional pipelines to prison, the City of North Charleston should make it easy and accessible for our youth to enroll in vocational training in barbering, forklift operation, welding, commercial transportation, etc. and to provide housing stipends so our youth can live and eat while they work toward a trade. This is not the only solution, but it is one we believe will have a positive impact. We truly believe that if our communities were presented with these types of alternatives they would not consent to mass surveillance.”
