Schöpke-Gonzalez: Why Hamtramck should get rid of its parking meters

The city of Hamtramck recently implemented parking meters to generate revenue for the city and its municipal parking services, increase traffic to local businesses and reduce illegal and dangerous parking behavior. 

The new policy has generated some pushback. University of Michigan School of Information PhD candidate Angela Schöpke-Gonzalez, an expert on the role of technology in creating just futures, wrote an op-ed to the Hamtramck Review explaining the risks of the new surveillance technology. 

Cameras mounted on the parking meters that utilize facial recognition technology, Schöpke-Gonzalez argues, have been reported to collect data that is then sent to immigration enforcement agencies. 

“In a city where US Census Bureau reports that 41.9% of our population was born outside of the US from 2017-2021 and about 45% of us report being non-White, the risks of family separation, deportation, and wrongful arrest based on either license plate data or facial data collected by the Sentry System are especially heightened,” she writes. 

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Read “Why Hamtramck should get rid of its parking meters” at the Hamtramck Review. 

Learn more about Angela Schöpke-Gonzalez by visiting her UMSI profile.