Over the last three and a half years, the City of Detroit has greatly expanded Project Green Light, an initiative of the Detroit Police Department (DPD), along with local businesses and other organizations, to use video surveillance and digital technology to fight crime. Since the first cameras went live in eight gas stations on January 1, 2016, the system has grown as of April 2020 to nearly 700 locations across the city.

Though it is billed by proponents as a “real-time crime-fighting” solution, others, including the DSA, see it as a mass-surveillance system that disproportionately singles out communities of color. In particular, critics cite flaws in the technology behind the project that are part of what sociologist Ruha Benjamin, in her study Race After Technology, terms the “New Jim Code.”

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