Last week, The Phoenix published a map of the college’s network of over 350 cameras on campus. Through the efforts of a team of our reporters, we made the first attempt at investigating Swarthmore’s surveillance network, which has been expanding without any public documentation or community input over the past few decades.
While Swarthmore is more transparent than some of its peer institutions who have no dedicated CCTV policy at all, we urge the college to take steps to include the community in its decision-making, including forming a CCTV committee composed of faculty, staff, and students to review current camera locations and determine the necessity of proposed cameras.
We recommend the college look to our neighbor in nearby Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to publishing a list of their outside camera locations, UPenn also has a CCTV Monitoring Panel — an eight-member committee that includes two students, two faculty members, and one staff member. The committee members each serve a term of one year.
In addition to ensuring that UPenn’s Public Safety department is adhering to their CCTV policy, the monitoring panel reviews proposed outdoor camera locations. According to UPenn’s policy, after the panel reviews and approves these cameras, the locations are published in the university’s almanac before installation.
When asked if Swarthmore would ever consider implementing some of these transparency practices like a list of external campus locations, the college claimed they could not publish the information due to safety concerns. We, The Phoenix’s Editorial Board, feel strongly that if the college will continue to install cameras and use and withhold any information about where they are and how many there are, community members should at least have a say in where cameras are installed and how many are added each year.
Multiple longtime faculty members said that faculty have never been included in decisions about camera installation on campus. Similarly, Swarthmore’s Student Government Organization (SGO) wrote in a statement to The Phoenix that they take issue with the college’s “lack of explicit communication” regarding decisions about surveillance.
In the same statement, SGO encouraged the administration to be more transparent regarding decisions that implicate students and to provide opportunities for student feedback.
We, The Phoenix’s Editorial Board, strongly encourage the college to consider meaningful strategies for integrating community input and feedback into the college’s CCTV decisions. In doing so, the surveillance network may better serve the interests of the community, rather than reflecting a unilateral decision by Public Safety and facilities. This committee would be an essential first step towards community involvement in decisions about surveillance on campus.
