About the Minneapolis Surveillance Camera Project

This project owes its existence to the NYC Surveillance Camera Project as done in 1998. Most of this project's participants had seen their map and wondered what such a map for Minneapolis might look like.

Over the next few years many of us started paying more attention to the security cameras that watched us each day as we walked through downtown Minneapolis. The projects founder counted nine cameras on his four block walk to work. Later our counts showed he missed some.

It wasn't until the June 6th gift of $250,000 from Target corporation to the city of Minneapolis for the purchase of an additional 30 cameras that we actually sat down and thought about making a Minneapolis Surveillance Camera map ourselves. However, the project's participants tried to find some common ground with respect to advocacy for or against cameras and came up blank. It seems the only thing on which we could all agree was that it would be nice to know where the cameras were.

That's pretty much where we're at now. A long weekend's work and a lot of sore necks find us with a workable website, a good reporting system, and the start of the city map. Hopefully over the summer we'll find the time to map out the rest of the city.