How Watched Are We?

To what extent are pedestrians in downtown Minneapolis monitored on surveillance cameras? Are most of the downtown cameras owned by the city or private businesses? Is the footage from these cameras recorded or just viewed? How long are the recordings kept? Who has access to the public camera footage?

The Minneapolis Surveillance Camera Project exists to answer these questions. Working with a shoestring budget, and a lot of very dedicated volunteers were working to inventory all the security cameras that record public spaces within the downtown area. Anyone is free to help out, just report any cameras you see that aren't on our list.

Why Are You Doing This?

This project's aim is only to answer the factual questions above. We do not intend to actively campaign for or against cameras watching public spaces -- indeed one of the project's volunteers owns surveillance cameras that catch public space in their field of view. On June 10th, 2003 a Star Tribune poll asked readers if they thought Surveillance cameras were needed downtown. The respondents seemed pretty evenly split on the matter.

Groups advocating both for and against surveillance cameras in public spaces each have good reasons and excellent intentions. We hope only to provide both sides with more raw data the include in their reports. If someone uses this data to add a new camera because they identified a surveillance gap on our map it is a valid use of this data. If someone selects a walking path designed to minimize the number of times they get taped on their way to and from work, that's also a fine use of this data.

What Can I Do?

Anyone and everyone is welcome to help by reporting cameras. If you have a digital camera we're trying to get low resolution photos of all the cameras and you could track them down from the map and upload photos of them. Those with a little less time on their hands but access to printing facilities or an office copy machine would help us out by printing up some of the excellent flyers someone donated. You might also want to consider joining the mailing list.