| NEWS | Medlinfrom p 9 ence between the [political] left and right, and what extreme wealth can do to your politics.” He admitted to putting a lot of emo- tional vulnerability into his writing but wanted people to know his new book didn’t tell everything. “Yeah yeah yeah,” he said. “I wrote a lot of stuff to get to the pieces that were in the book. I called that my autobiography at the time, but I had no intention of publishing it. I knew I had to write it to get to what- ever else I was going to say. It let me say what I needed to put on the page and then Mesa from p 11 local police have at their disposal, typically integrating live camera networks with things like social media tracking or predic- tive policing tech. They’re also controver- sial — activists say they erode privacy, and some police departments have shuttered them after they proved too costly to main- tain. It’s not fully clear exactly what tech Mesa plans to buy with the $3.3 million; it will fund the video wall of cameras at the center, plus integration software. But the city already has CCTV cameras and, in May, spent $300,000 on another new, mo- bile camera system. (The Mesa police chief and the city manager did not respond to in- quiries from New Times.) According to the Atlas of Surveillance, which tracks such centers across the coun- try, there is currently only one other real- time crime center in Arizona, at the Tucson police department. Mesa’s planned expenditures on its project, too, are notably high: Atlanta, which is roughly the same size as Mesa, spent just over a million on its center. Other cities spend far less, according to a report from the Elec- tronic Frontier Foundation. “Because they’re expensive, because they’re big, there’s a long history of depart- ments doing anything they can to pay for them and for the technology to fill them up,” Guariglia explained. Some depart- Light Rail from p 12 innovation subcommittee “soon.” Councilmember Debra Stark, who chairs the transportation subcommittee and has historically been a proponent of light rail, did not respond to a request for comment regarding the issue. For other light rail supporters, the Citi- zens Transportation Commission vote and the new power balance on the city council are encouraging. “The Phoenix City Council failed to up- 14 hold citizens’ vote,” said Diane Brown, ex- ecutive director of the Arizona Public decide what I wanted readers to see on the page. I’m confident it’s all in there.” Gaming is definitely in there. “I’m a huge gamer,” said Medlin. “The poem ‘Bat- tlefront’ came from many hours of playing that game with friends. There’s a part in there that’s true where I talk about the way the Wookiees are like black folks, and my friends are laughing at me That was a real gaming moment, and I had to put that in there.” Medlin took a long pause to think about that long-ago gaming moment. “I try to treat everything in my life as potential ma- terial for another piece of writing,” he fi- nally said. ments have even used private donors or corporate sponsors. Then, “they link up to as much surveillance as the department has.” So far, there has been little dissent from the council or the mayor regarding the pro- posal. Just one council member, Kevin Thompson, inquired about privacy issues during an initial presentation in June. Mesa police chief Ken Cost replied that the policy was “being developed right now.” (In an email to New Times, Kennington clarified that the city already follows fed- eral privacy guidelines on privacy and “will continue to follow these guidelines.”) “The real problem here is, what re- course does the community have to say, I don’t want you to do that?” Ryan Winkle, former Mesa city councilmember told New Times. He said he thought that the city had sought little buy-in from residents before allocating the money against “the spirit of what it’s meant to be.” Mesa would disagree. Kennington says that the city’s plans follow federal guidance to bolster public safety with the relief funds: “The Real Time Crime Center does that,” he wrote. But critics argue that the definition is narrow: “Public safety encompasses a lot more,” Miller said. As Guariglia put it: “There’s no way to police yourself out of a pandemic. And there’s certainly no way to surveil yourself out of a pandemic.” Interest Research Group, which has lob- bied for light rail in the past. “Fortunately, they are now moving in a direction that residents have stated they want.” Ryan Boyd, a spokesperson for Urban Phoenix Project, an urbanist advocacy group, expressed concern that the project could get bogged down in the bureaucratic muck. “This is a time to put action behind this instead of just putting it into a bureau- cratic rabbit hole and hope that it gets out in the next century,” he said. Boyd added, “It’s something that really should have never been cut in the first place. This is long overdue.” SEPT 23RD – SEPT 29TH, 2021 PHOENIX NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | NEWS | OPINION | FEEDBACK | CONTENTS | phoenixnewtimes.com
