The tenants of Faircliff, a 112-unit low-income housing complex, are now enjoying the fruits of a recently completed $16 million city-financed rehabilitation project. Along with the fresh carpeting, modish playground equipment, and new community center came a state-of-the-art security system, aimed at helping Faircliff shed its reputation as an open-air drug market and better meld with the $400,000 condos sprouting up elsewhere on Clifton Street NW. The system includes not only cameras on all of the residential buildings but also what surveillance-industry types refer to as “one-way voice” intercoms, meaning tenants can be addressed by their watchers but cannot respond to them.
In recent months, residents and guests alike who have violated the stringent apartment rules have been singled out over the intercoms and given orders such as "get off the steps," "no chairs allowed in the playground area," or, perhaps most common, "no loitering."
Wanda Griffin, who has seen children ordered to not eat ice cream on their steps, says the hardiest residents respond to their unseen watchers with a flurry of f-bombs, which the intended targets can’t hear, and a pair of middle fingers pointed in arbitrary directions. The intercom directives have also kicked off a semantic debate at the complex: Is it possible to loiter in front of your own home, where you pay rent?
Residents of a recently renovated Columbia Heights apartment complex – many of them poor and using Section 8 housing benefits – are now live under the gaze of surveillance cameras, monitored from afar by employees of a private company who can bark instructions at residents via loudspeakers. Dave Jamieson's story from Washington DC's City Paper dates to July of last year, but I didn't know this technology was in the States yet. I'm much relieved to learn we have imported it from England.
