Lawyer Raphaël Balloul is taking the city of Vannes to court to protest against the proliferation of CCTV cameras. The town hall considers that it is responding to a request from the Vannetais.
Accustomed to defending others, Raphaël Balloul initiated this procedure in his own name. This lawyer at the bar of Rennes is suing the city of Vannes for a decision taken in October 2021, report the Telegram and The Parisian.
On October 11, 2021, the municipal council of Vannes (Morbihan) validated with 39 votes for and one against the extension of its video protection system. The town hall’s objective is to go from 109 cameras in 2021 to 177 in 2026, for a total budget of 2 million euros.
An unacceptable measure for Raphaël Balloul, who denounces the lack of “proportionality” and filed an appeal before the administrative court in December 2021. “An administrative police measure must be proportionate, but no element justifies this need”, affirms the Vannetais from BFMTV.com.
“There will always be a blind spot, something we haven’t seen,” he adds.
Contacted by BFMTV.com, the town hall indicates that it does not comment on an ongoing procedure.
Artificial intelligence at the heart of the debates
One point particularly tenses the two parties: artificial intelligence. Deliberation of the municipal council of 2021 provides that the envelope will also be used for the “adaptation” of the existing fleet of cameras “to artificial intelligence developments”.
This concept refers to devices consisting of automated image processing software associated with cameras, according to the Cnil. The personal data protection supervisory authority emphasizes in a July 2022 review that it encompasses a wide variety of purposes, such as tracking people, detecting suspicious events such as jumping over a subway gantry or even identifying people through facial recognition.
For Raphaël Balloul, cameras using artificial intelligence “raise questions in terms of infringement of freedoms, control of algorithms, transparency and framework”.
The town hall strongly disputes: “we did not buy a camera using artificial intelligence and we will not buy one,” she told BFMTV.com.
A “turnaround” of the town hall?
According to the assistant in charge of security, Monique Jean, the confusion would come from a “proposal” concerning this technology from the project management assistant (AMO) in the specifications of the public order of the cameras .
“It was a proposal from the AMO which was not accepted,” she says.
For Raphaël Balloul, it is rather a “reversal” of the town hall in the face of the media coverage of its procedure: “it is the first time in 13 months of procedure that they display this position”, affirms- he. If he admits that he does not know what has actually been concluded with between the service providers and the municipality, he judges that to affirm that “this was never considered, it is smoking out”.
“Video protection is an old policy of the city”, we insist on the side of Vannes, and “security is one of the priorities of the mayor”. “The citizens, if we listened to them, we would put cameras everywhere”, also declares Monique Jean.
She affirms that “video surveillance is used to make searches, to elucidate investigations and to prevent risks”.
The device has already started to be deployed, as planned in the budgets 2022 (300,000 euros allocated to installing additional cameras and “upgrading” existing ones) and 2023 (615,000 euros dedicated to the continuation of this program). The city says it currently has 120 CCTV cameras.
A utility never demonstrated statistically
In a 2020 report on municipal policethe Court of Audit emphasizes that “video surveillance has become a common internal security tool” but that an assessment of “its contribution to judicial clarification” would be necessary. This court responsible for controlling public expenditure noted that, for the moment, “no overall correlation has been found between the existence of video protection devices and the level of crime committed on the public highway, or even the rates elucidation”.
The following year, the National Gendarmerie Officers’ School Research Center (CREOGN) provided the beginnings of an answer to these questions. In a report published by CREOGN in September 2021, researchers studied the contribution of video protection in nearly 2000 past judicial investigations. They observed that while the videos captured by these cameras in public spaces “contribute to the resolution of judicial investigations, by providing clues or evidence”, they do so “in particularly small proportions (about 1% of the investigations studied )”.
“Despite a plebiscite in the speeches, the investigators do not seem to really devote video surveillance recordings as an essential resource in their daily investigative work”, also concluded the document.
