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Welcome to The 1909, the podcast that takes an in-depth look at The State News’ biggest stories of the week, while bringing in new perspectives from the reporters who wrote them.
It's Thursday, April 4th, and this is the 19 09, the state news's weekly podcast featuring our reporters talking about the news. I'm your host, Alex Walters. This week, policing at MSU is going through a complete change. The university has quietly put 1,000,000 of dollars into an advanced AI powered surveillance system that's said to see all. Since a campus shooting last year, police have said the new technology could help keep you safer.
Alex:But as details have finally emerged, students and experts are growing concerned about the consequences of the system. With a history of MSU's independent police department using undercover tactics and AI technology to monitor student speech, activists aren't quick to trust that this new tech won't be abused. Here to discuss it all this week is state news administration reporter Theo Sherr.
Theo:Hey, Alex.
Alex:Theo, great to have you back. Thank you. Thank you. Alright. So you and I, since we started working together last fall, have been very interested in the system that MSCPD Mhmm.
Alex:Has been talking about. It was announced after the shooting. They said our security, we're centralizing it. And it wasn't a 100% clear what that meant. Details, we slowly got them.
Alex:We slowly learned more. But tell us, where are we at now this week as we finally decided it's time. We know enough to really write about this thing.
Theo:Right. Yeah. So just a few days ago, we got, around 1200 pages of of planning documents, of of contracts, of different capabilities really specifying what this system can do because you're right. It has really been very vague in the past. So I guess I can run through a few of the different, Yeah.
Alex:That would be great if just, you know, in sort of the broadest terms, what is it that this, you know, they call it the security operations center, this sort of mysterious system. What what does it do? Right.
Theo:So there are 26,000 data points that are gonna be introduced, integrated into this system around campus. This includes cameras. Right? Doors, electronic doors, different sensors, etcetera. It'll all be monitored and controlled through one space, a security operations center.
Theo:Right? So this gives them the power to, lock and unlock doors in any given area of campus, lock down even specific doors, specific floors and buildings by controlling access to elevators. Right? Track car activity, you know, they have license plate readers that are integrated into the system. Count the number of people in in crowds, in in in rooms, etcetera.
Theo:Track the movement of certain, you know, individuals they want to, monitor and, you know, it can actually even distinguish between, adults, children, people in wheelchairs, etcetera. It uses this AI based, system to sort of recognize who's a person, who's not make these these different counts, of groups. And so it's sort
Alex:of like, you know, MSU has had security cameras for a long time. Right. We've had door locks. We've had sensors on doors and alarms and whatnot. But now these tens of thousands of things are all going through this one this room, basically.
Alex:And from what we've heard about this room, it's, like, you know, these big computer screens all over, and there are these people powered by the police department cops 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They sit and they look at these screens and they watch campus. And this AI basically decides what is most important to show them at any given moment. Right. Right.
Alex:And and let me ask you. I think that the first question that we kinda had going into this, I think a lot of people had because so much of the investment in this to talk about it has come after the shooting as almost like a response to it, can something like this stop a mass shooting? I mean, we've talked to experts on on the technology, experts in sort of the legal side of it, the ethics of it, people who have studied it from a sociology perspective. You know, is this is this the thing to stop mass shootings with $10,000,000 that they spent on it? Are we not gonna have another one?
Theo:Right. Well, that's that's the big question. I mean, it's important to know in every one of those sort of community updates that, the vice president of safety and security, Marlon Lynch sent out, It would always mention these upgrades as one of the ways that they're combating, you know, safety after the shooting. They're improving safety. They're making us all safe.
Theo:But the experts that we talked to, they said that it's really not as effective at, deterring shootings as you would think
Alex:Yeah.
Theo:As you would hope.
Alex:Well, it's interesting because, you know, I talked to one expert today from sort of a national, they're they're almost a good publication. They write about these security systems, research them independently, somewhere between a publication of Think Tank, I guess. And he put it very succinctly saying that, like, it's interesting that in the wake of the mass shooting, MSU has said this security operations intelligence surveillance center is the thing that's gonna keep you safe. When a mass shooting, at least in his view of it, is kind of one of the criminal acts that requires the least intelligence and surveillance because it's like people are being killed in a public place that's, you know, pretty widely known. And so he was like this might save the cops a couple seconds, but it's, he was surprised to see it advertised and kind of talked about as, like, a shooting related thing.
Alex:But Right. Going with that, we've talked to students about this. Right? Because maybe students feel safer because of this. And the the ones that we talk to, predominantly student activists, which we'll get to why they kind of play into this, have said that if anything, it might kind of make them more uncomfortable and not feel safer.
Alex:Talk about what these students said to us.
Theo:Yeah. The students, they said that, yeah, being surveilled, is not a good feeling, they told us. They they compared it to this concept of of Panopticon. Right? So it's it's kind of like a prison system where all of the the rooms, are, surrounding one one point where a
Alex:guard is blocked. Prison. Right? With, like, the tower kind of? It's like the
Theo:campus. And they said that that is sort of an uncomfortable feeling, you know, especially you we talked to a a researcher who, said it's you you go through these these these natural college cycles. Right? You're you're youthful indiscretion. Yeah.
Theo:Exactly. Those are now being watched. You're not a mass shooter. You're just somebody that, you know, maybe smoking weed, right, on campus or whatever. That's that's that's the thing that the majority of the time is going to be watched by these these systems, he's saying.
Alex:I think he put it in sort of a funny way. This is an expert, a law professor at American University that wrote a book called Big Data Policing. Mhmm.
Theo:And he
Alex:says, you know, I'm I'm just thankful we didn't have these camera systems when he was in college.
Theo:Right. Right.
Alex:Is his quote about it. But what about and sort of a specific thread within that discomfort that we've come to again and again is the idea that, you know, disproportionately the people who are going to be most affected by this and probably most made uncomfortable by this, both both because of limitations in the technology and just sort of the nature of modern policing, are, you know, minoritized students. You talk about we talk to students, we talk to experts about about that specific factor. Tell me, you know, how is is racial bias involved in the way that this technology works?
Theo:Right. So we have a lot of research on how policing in general, disproportionately, you know, affects black people. The the experts that we said that, they said that that it's basically just a continuation, of that. It it's expanding their power to to to monitor, to police, different groups. And we see the same things that black communities are overpoliced, are over you know, surveillance is is focused in on those communities.
Theo:I I talked to a researcher who studied this is interesting. He studied high schools. At a high school level, schools with more surveillance, correlated with, higher detention rates, for black students, higher punishments. You know? They were yeah.
Theo:They they were Disproportionately. Yeah. Exactly. Which then resulted in, you know, different academic consequences, like missed missed classes, missed, tests, etcetera. He says that he expects the same thing, on the university level as well.
Theo:That you're going to give police the opportunity to continue these biases that we we see already.
Alex:Mhmm. And then another thread here that I think is worth kind of following as this technology is expanded is this idea that one thing this technology does Crowds. And when we talk to student activists about that, they said that as soon as they heard this, the first thing they thought of is, is this going to be a way for universities to police protests? And I think it's especially relevant in this kind of current moment, right, where, you know, there's more student activism, I think, than ever on college campuses. And, you know, 50 miles down the road in Ann Arbor, we're seeing colleges, you know, do all sorts of policies to crack down on student speech as students are sort of protesting, you know, their thoughts on the situation in Israel Palestine.
Alex:And so in this moment, I think students are very concerned about the capability of using this in protest setting. This morning, we sat down with MCPD with the officer who runs the system, and we asked him, you know, are you gonna use this in a protest setting?
Theo:He said that he doesn't foresee MSU Police, using it in that context.
Alex:I see. And we went and we talked to the students about that, and we said they say they're not gonna use it. What what did the students say?
Theo:They said that frankly, they don't trust them. There there is a a large, a long history, regarding surveillance of student groups and and and policing. So At MSU. At MSU. Yeah.
Theo:So I mean, to to do it, briefly, in 2001, there was a undercover cop that, infiltrated a student group for over a year. It's like sort of a anti capitalist group.
Alex:And I think didn't they I remember reading these state news stories. They, like, see the cop in the form. Her. I'm camping. That's like that's what's her name from the club.
Alex:Right. And then they realized that she's it was a cop the whole time. Exactly.
Theo:So that was 2001. Jump forward to 2018. There's, they bring Richard Spencer To
Alex:the prominent white supremacists.
Theo:Yeah. Exactly. To campus for as a speaker, there's huge protests, undercover police at those as well. 2019, you reported on this, they were using the police were using, a Oh, like
Alex:an open source monitoring. So it's like an AI based.
Theo:Yeah.
Alex:But it only reads what's publicly accessible. So it was like Twitter and TikTok and Yik Yak and whatever.
Theo:They were tracking these the social media activity, specifically tracking a PETA protest, in in 2019. And now these capabilities, I mean, they were dabbling in AI, back then. Now they've greatly expanded their ability to, count crowds. 1 of specifically, one of the features is, they count the number of people in an area, and they get an alert once it crosses a a special threshold or whatever. So they're notified when these groups are forming.
Alex:Well, there's only just this simple thing of, like, you know, beyond the sort of, like, AI enabled capabilities. Campus is just under surveillance, and MSCPD watching. They're seeing who's doing what at any given time. And I think the student activists we talked about said that, feels like a chilling factor, and they they just don't trust that the university is not gonna use it. They're saying you're buying all this technology.
Alex:You have the capability. Like, come on. Like, they're gonna use it. That's, you know, what the activists told us. And it's just the experts we talked to also said that even if the university really doesn't use the technology in a protest context, there's still a chilling factor because just people knowing that if I demonstrate, if I, you know, speak out against something at the university, I'm watched, I'm kept track of, they might make different decisions about how to use their speech on campus.
Alex:And And so it's like even if, you know, the university will say, like, we're not gonna do that, the capability in itself, I guess, has a a potential to chill speech.
Theo:Yeah. This is a good point. I think an expert that I talked to put in an interesting way. 99% of the time, this is not gonna be used. Oh, well, more than that.
Theo:It's not gonna be used to track a mass shooter. That's a very rare event. So the question is, what is it gonna be used for?
Alex:And what about you know, this is something that has been rolled out very sort of quietly. They've announced it a lot saying, oh, it's gonna be this thing. It's gonna make us all feel safe, but the actual details of it are not something they've ever publicly said. We're only now knowing them through these FOIA requests for these contractor agreements that we've gotten our hands on. You know, I talked to one expert today that talked about how public rollout could maybe build more trust in the process.
Alex:You know, had they done some sort of public listening sessions and feedback and whatnot, it might have helped people like these student activists trust what MSCPD is doing or MSCPDPPS, I should say, a little bit more. Talk about this, like, parking enforcement kind of side of this whole system.
Theo:This is a big thing. I mean, as we've reported, I mean, not not us, but, MCU Police issued how many tickets in in parking on the last year?
Alex:I think we did a 1909 episode.
Theo:They're enhancing that even more. They they will be installing these, stationary cameras that are designed to to read license plates and basically track who's going in the parking lot, who's exiting, and kind of keeping tabs on, you know, if there are any violations of of of parking. They're they're enhancing their parking enforcement.
Alex:It's certainly gonna become a little bit harder to park on campus. Right. Right. It's
Theo:gonna change a lot.
Alex:Yeah. Change a lot. Parking might not be the most important, but could certainly become frustrating. Mhmm. Well, anyway, Theo, thank thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about all this complicated stuff.
Alex:And those of you listening should be sure to read the story on satnews.com because it's a good one. Yeah. Well, that's all for now. We're gonna be back next week with fresh reporting from the great minds here at the state news. Until then, the story we discussed today and a bunch more are available at statenews.com.
Alex:Thank you to my guest, Theo, for once again joining us, our podcast editor Anthony Brinson, video producer Brad LaPlante, and most of all, thank you for listening. The 19:09, I'm Alex Walters.