Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS)

Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) is the model-ordinance campaign and democratic-governance framing through which the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation — joined by a national coalition at launch — have organised US communities since 2016 to assert that decisions about whether police agencies acquire and deploy surveillance technology belong to city councils and the communities they represent, not unilaterally to law enforcement. The framing operates as both a policy demand (community democratic control over surveillance) and a legal vehicle (a model ordinance requiring city council approval before any police agency may acquire or use any surveillance technology). Where parallel framings like Ban Biometric Mass Surveillance and #BanTheScan pursue categorical prohibition, CCOPS pursues democratic procedural authority: the community's right to hear the case for a surveillance technology, weigh its civil-liberties costs, and say yes or no — and often, as EFF has written, the answer should be no. The framing's substantive anchor is the argument that surveillance technologies, deployed without community input, have turned non-white and low-income neighbourhoods into what EFF called "fishbowls" — permanent objects of scrutiny, with no democratic mechanism for residents to limit the gaze. By 2022, CCOPS laws had been adopted in 26 US jurisdictions protecting nearly 18 million people, with the San Francisco 2019 facial recognition ban and the 2020 New York City adoption as the campaign's landmark milestones.

Origin

The framing's roots are in the ACLU California affiliates' work beginning in 2014 to draft a model local surveillance ordinance and run a statewide California campaign — an effort that produced a legislative template and a coalition before the national campaign had a name. The first ordinance passed in 2016 in Santa Clara County, California, through a coalition including EFF, the ACLU of Northern California, CAIR San Francisco Bay Area, and the Electronic Frontier Alliance member organisation Oakland Privacy. The national CCOPS campaign launched formally on 21 September 2016, with the ACLU and EFF joined by the Bill of Rights Defense Committee/Defending Dissent Foundation, Demand Progress, Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, NAACP, National Network of Arab American Communities, Restore the Fourth, South Asian Americans Leading Together, and the Tenth Amendment Center as founding coalition partners. The launch named eleven initial target municipalities spanning politically diverse US regions — New York City, Washington DC, Richmond VA, Miami Beach, Pensacola FL, Hattiesburg MS, Muskegon MI, Madison WI, Milwaukee WI, Seattle WA, and Palo Alto CA — and framed the campaign's strategic premise: that surveillance technology acquisition had been "too often made only by local law enforcement officials seeking to acquire the latest, shiny tools" without community input, producing surveillance systems that operated as a form of population-specific control over communities of colour.

The eight guiding principles

The campaign's eight guiding principles defined the minimum standard a CCOPS ordinance must meet. Taken together, they describe a full democratic-accountability procedure for surveillance technology:

1. City council pre-approval. Before acquiring any surveillance technology, a police agency must obtain explicit approval from the city council.
2. Meaningful community role. Communities must have "a significant and meaningful role in determining if and how" surveillance technologies are adopted — approval by a council that has not consulted the public does not satisfy the principle.
3. Transparent and well-informed decisions. The public and decision-makers must have access to the factual basis on which any acquisition decision rests.
4. Technology-specific and use-specific approval. A general authorisation for "surveillance equipment" is not enough; each technology and each intended use requires its own council approval.
5. Civil rights and civil liberties impact assessment. The ordinance must require an explicit accounting of how a proposed technology would affect civil rights and civil liberties — particularly for communities of colour and low-income communities.
6. Financial-implications consideration. The full lifecycle cost of surveillance technology — acquisition, maintenance, training, oversight — must be part of the council's deliberation.
7. Annual public reporting. Police agencies must report annually to the public and council on how each approved surveillance technology has been used.
8. No grandfathering. Surveillance technologies already in use at the time of the ordinance's passage are subject to the same approval requirements, not exempted.

The procedural elaboration — publish an impact statement and use policy, run a public comment period, obtain pre-approval, submit annual compliance reports, and undergo annual council review — gives the eight principles their operational shape. The model ordinance's test, as EFF formulates it, is that the city council must find that the benefits of a proposed technology outweigh its costs and that the use policy will effectively protect human rights, before approval can issue.

Spread and adoption

By May 2021, 18 US communities had adopted CCOPS laws. The jurisdictions spanned California (Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berkeley, Davis, Oakland, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Santa Clara County), Massachusetts (Boston, Cambridge, Lawrence, Northampton, Somerville), and five other states (Grand Rapids MI, Madison WI, Nashville TN, New York City, Seattle WA, Yellow Springs OH). By 2022, the ACLU counted 26 jurisdictions protecting nearly 18 million people.

Two adoptions mark the campaign's most consequential milestones. In May 2019, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed the Stop Secret Surveillance Ordinance — introduced by Supervisor Aaron Peskin — which became the first municipal ban on facial recognition technology in the United States. The ordinance sits inside the CCOPS framework: its operative requirement is not just the facial recognition prohibition but the broader city council approval process for all surveillance technology acquisitions, with the facial recognition ban as the ordinance's most visible substantive act. In June 2020, New York City passed the POST Act (Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology) — making New York the 14th and largest US city to adopt a CCOPS-framework law, requiring the NYPD to publicly disclose its surveillance technologies and the policies governing their use.

The Massachusetts cluster — Cambridge (2018), Somerville (2019), Boston, Lawrence, Northampton — is the most geographically dense CCOPS adoption, produced through sustained ACLU of Massachusetts organising led by Kade Crockford's Technology for Liberty programme and working through city-level coalitions of civil-liberties, racial-justice, and community organisations.

Why it has carried

Three features have made CCOPS durable as an organising frame.

First, it shifts the terrain from prohibition to governance. CCOPS does not require communities to successfully argue that any particular surveillance technology is inherently impermissible — a position that requires winning a factual and normative debate with law enforcement about each technology's capabilities and harms. Instead, it requires communities to win a procedural argument: that surveillance technology decisions are too consequential to be made unilaterally by police agencies without democratic oversight. That procedural demand is structurally easier to win across politically diverse municipalities than a categorical prohibition, because it aligns with widely-held principles about democratic accountability that do not depend on resolving technical disputes about facial recognition error rates or predictive-policing accuracy.

Second, the framing builds in a disproportionate-impact argument at the framework level rather than the technology level. The eight guiding principles require a civil rights and civil liberties impact assessment as a structural component of every approval process — meaning that communities of colour and low-income communities are positioned as stakeholders in every CCOPS decision, not as incidental beneficiaries of a ruling that goes their way. That architectural choice has made CCOPS legible to racial-justice coalitions as a governance tool, not just a civil-liberties tool, and has supported the multi-coalition character of CCOPS campaigns in cities like San Francisco and Cambridge.

Third, the model ordinance's legal template has made the framing portable at low cost. A coalition in a new city can take the ACLU-EFF model bill, adapt it to local legislative procedure, and run a campaign whose substantive and legal architecture does not have to be invented from scratch. That portability is the reason the framing has propagated across 26 jurisdictions in a decade — from politically liberal California and Massachusetts cities to the Midwest (Grand Rapids, Madison, Nashville) and to the nation's largest city — without requiring a centrally-resourced campaign in each location.

Structurally, CCOPS occupies a distinct register from both the European prohibition framing (msg-ban-biometric-mass-surveillance) and the abolitionist-policing framing (msg-automating-banishment) that map adjacent terrain in this corpus. The three framings differ not on the analysis of surveillance harm but on the political theory of the remedy: prohibition (remove the technology from permissible use), governance (subordinate the technology to democratic oversight), and abolition (dismantle the apparatus in which the technology is embedded). CCOPS is the governance variant — the framing that tries to make democratic accountability over police surveillance technology operational at the city council level, in the existing legal and political structures that US organising has to work with.