Detroit’s highly touted Project Green Light, a crime-fighting initiative that relies on a widespread surveillance network of high-definition cameras throughout the city, was ineffective at reducing violent crime, the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice concluded.
The findings contradict repeated claims by the Detroit Police Department and Mayor Mike Duggan that the controversial surveillance system was responsible for large reductions in violent crimes. In May 2019, Duggan claimed that violent crime fell 31% at businesses that use the high-surveillance cameras. He also said carjackings were down 40% from 2015 to 2018.
The DOJ found no evidence that the cameras reduced violent crime.
“There was no statistically significant difference in violent crime reporting for treated businesses that implemented Project Green Light, compared with matched untreated control businesses that did not implement the initiative, from the preintervention period to 1-year postimplementation,” the DOJ report states.
What Project Green Light did do was reduce property crimes, the DOJ said. In areas where high-definition cameras were installed, reported property crimes declined about 27% after the first year of Project Green Light’s implementation.
Detroit police officials say the DOJ study was narrow in scope and failed to capture the full impact of Project Green Light.
“Project Green Light Detroit is intended to prevent, detect, and solve crime,” DPD spokesman Jackson Vidaurri told Metro Times in a statement. “The evaluations only looked at the program as a deterrent and was unable to separate changes in crime at PGLD locations from prevailing crime trends.”
He added, “While deterrence is difficult to analyze, some measures of solvability are easier to observe. Previous department analysis has found that PGLD cases with video evidence had a higher closure rate than non-PGLD cases with or without video evidence. Additionally, PGLD cases were solved more quickly than other types of cases, and that cases with video evidence that were not solved were active longer, indicating that investigators spent more time and had more leads to investigate than cases without video evidence.”
The city launched Project Green Light in 2016 at gas stations, liquor stores, and fast-food restaurants, where a disproportionate number of violent crimes are committed. To participate, businesses purchased high-definition cameras at an average cost of $4,000 to $6,000 and installed extra lighting and deterrent signage.
The live video is fed to monitors at the Detroit Police Department’s real-time crime center, where officers use the high-definition images to help track down suspects and solve crimes.
Since its inception, the city has installed hundreds of more surveillance cameras at parks, schools, low-income housing complexes, immigration centers, gas stations, churches, abortion clinics, hotels, health centers, apartments, and addiction treatment centers.
Privacy and civil rights activists have criticized the saturation of cameras, saying the predominantly Black city is being over-surveilled.
Some businesses have complained that the city was strong-arming them to buy and install the cameras.
At times, the cameras can hold police accountable. When Memphis officers brutally beat Tyre Nichols on the night of Jan. 7, a surveillance camera affixed to a utility pole provided a clear, bird’s-eye view of the beating in a way that police body cams did not. The SkyCop camera is one of about 2,000 installed in the city that feed live video to the city’s real-time crime center.
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