If police in your community are saying they want to install a new surveillance technology — face recognition, cameras, or license plate scanners, for example — they’re likely to be touted as the way to prevent all manners of evil, from terrorism to street crime to fraud to package theft. If we just record everything, surveillance boosters would have us believe, we can stop or solve crimes and life will be better. The authorities will also probably have specific stories they tell you — hypothetical or real — in which the technology saved the day.

How should we process those claims? If the technology can do some real good, should we accept it?

We humans naturally think in stories, and a compelling anecdote, narrative, or mental image, particularly one that evokes fear, frequently defeats all rational argumentation. But that’s often a terrible way to make decisions that shape the fundamental contours of power in our society. Ideally, public debates around surveillance technologies would revolve not around particular “movie plot” scenarios, but around a more rational, systematic, and broadly humanistic vision of technology and its role in our society.

Credit: AP Photo/Noah Berger, File

Surveillance opponents use stories too, but law enforcement and other operators of surveillance tech typically have a big advantage: they can put their success stories on television while burying their failures. In 2014, for example, the police in Chicago announced the sentencing of a robber who may have been the first criminal caught by face recognition. But how many false leads did the police chase in that and other cases before they caught that first, highly publicized suspect? How many people were investigated, interrogated, intimidated, frightened, or had their privacy invaded because of this technology, to produce the success story that the police touted? We may never know, and are unlikely to find out.

So how do communities, policymakers, and political leaders avoid being snookered — either by corporate or police department public relations departments, or by our own human tendency to be guided by stories and anecdotes? A good way to make more sophisticated decisions is by asking ourselves these six questions.

In many ways this is the threshold question, because if a technology doesn’t work, then we can stop there. There’s no reason to waste time debating privacy, or safety, or other values. Of course, most technologies work at least some of the time, in which case the question is: How well does it work? Does it fail 5 percent of the time or 95 percent? And how do we know? Can we trust the information we’re given about that rate?

Take face recognition, for example. Vendors started pushing the technology hard right after 9/11, but at that time it was highly ineffective, and deployments, though dangerous, also verged on the silly. The dawn of machine learning made the technology much more effective, though it still has error rates that are very much relevant to conversations about the technology. New technologies, in particular, often perform badly, but local officials often don’t have the expertise to cut through hype and sales jobs and recognize snake-oil when they see it.

Even a technology that works perfectly may not stop bad things very often, depending on the details and context of its deployment. A metal detector, for example, might detect metal 100 percent of the time — but fail to detect plastic explosives or ceramic guns. Even a face recognition algorithm that is nearly 100 percent effective can be defeated by things as simple as a baseball cap, mask, or sunglasses. There are many similar technological equivalents of the Maginot Line, the heavily fortified defensive frontier built by the French before World War II, which was rendered useless when Hitler’s army simply went around it.

How serious are the bad things the technology claims to prevent, and how frequent or likely are those things? If a technology only saves the day every 20 years, but “saving the day” means preventing a global pandemic or nuclear attack, that could justify steep costs. On the other hand, if success means preventing somebody from jaywalking, that would be a different balance even if it happens many times a day.

Even if a technology is effective and important, what are its downsides? We might be able to prevent the smuggling of weapons from other parts of the world if we close our borders, but nobody is willing to accept the enormous consequences that measure would have. We might cut down on domestic violence and other crimes if we allowed the government to install cameras in everyone’s bedrooms, but we’re not willing to accept the side effects of such a step. Side effects can include the loss of privacy, the possibility of abuse, chilling effects on creativity and freedom of expression, and disparate racial impacts that worsen existing social injustices — all of which could be produced by our example of face recognition — as well as more tangible things like pollution, noise, and economic harm.

“Security” is the most common justification for new surveillance, but that is a term that should be viewed holistically. It’s true that theft or physical attack can harm people’s happiness and make them feel unsafe, but so can many other things — such as oppressive surveillance and violent police officers. For example, if a “security” drone flies over my yard, do I have to worry that it will record me and my friends smoking weed, get my house raided by a SWAT team, and leave me with lasting feelings of violation and insecurity? That kind of degradation in people’s security, properly conceived, is a side effect of surveillance technology that we should be especially alert to.

Every dollar spent on high-tech surveillance devices means a dollar not spent on other community improvements that might do much more to improve the lives of its residents. In a rational world, money would be spent first on measures that will bring the greatest improvements to the greatest number of people’s lives, and something like expensive cameras to protect against rare or minor threats would not be allowed to vault to the top of the list just because they’re sold via a vivid story. Face recognition, for example, in addition to producing bad side effects such as chilling effects, may soak up public funds that could be used to help a community address social problems, become more prosperous, and enjoy improved physical infrastructure.

A technology can’t be evaluated without considering the answers to the above questions, but there’s no mathematical formula for measuring those variables or computing how they should balance against each other. That will inevitably be a judgment call. But since we live in a democracy, that judgment should be made openly and democratically by each community, not unilaterally or in secret by police chiefs or other public servants. That’s why we have been educating communities around the nation on the advantages of enacting “Community Control Over Police Surveillance” or CCOPS bills, which require law enforcement to get permission from their city council (or other elected oversight body) before deploying new surveillance technologies. Seattle learned the wisdom of this the hard way in 2013 when it had to return a surveillance drone it had quietly purchased because the community objected vehemently to the technology. Nowadays I see many of the smarter police chiefs consult with their communities before deploying a new surveillance technology, whether or not their city has enacted a CCOPs ordinance. A number of communities have banned their police from using face recognition, and there are surely others that would react badly if it were introduced.

The next time you hear someone pushing a new surveillance technology by telling a story about how it saved the day by stopping something bad, remember that it’s important to dig deeper and seek a fuller picture of the technology and its place in your community.

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, our laws did not provide any recourse against the discrimination she faced. In the decades that followed, organizers and civil rights groups won key battles to expand our laws to protect against discrimination for Black people, women, and people with disabilities. Until recently, thanks to the groundwork laid by people like Parks, people who faced discrimination could seek damages for the emotional distress they endured. But the U.S. Supreme Court blocked that avenue for relief in Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, P.L.L.C, turning its back on our communities and effectively making such discrimination legal.

In its decision, the court guts key civil rights remedies by revoking the right of victims of race, sex, and disability discrimination to recover emotional distress damages — essentially blocking victims from bringing lawsuits at all.

Though often excluded from discussions of the court’s radical shift to the right, the egregious impact of this decision cannot be understated. After Cummings, discrimination cases that cannot show economic harm will never see the light of day. So, providers who turn away people with disabilities because they cannot be bothered to provide accommodations, or doctors who are openly racist to patients, would face no consequence for their obvious discrimination.

In its amicus brief the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the National Women’s Law Center highlighted a number of discrimination cases that would be affected by this decision. In each of these cases, emotional distress damages are the primary tool used to seek justice for victims. In Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools, for example, in which a young girl was sexually harassed by her teacher, the injuries required damages only for emotional, not economic, harm. Similarly, in Zeno v. Pine Plains Central School District, in which a Black student suffered racial harassment and assault for more than three years, damages that addressed the psychological harm on the student were the only way to hold the school accountable.

After Cummings, cases like these will be nearly impossible to bring. Here’s what you need to know about this shameful decision.

Jane Cummings, who is deaf and legally blind, was denied services from a physical therapist’s office — Premier Rehab Keller — because of her disability. The office refused to provide Cummings with an American Sign Language interpreter at her sessions, although they were required to under federal anti-discrimination laws.

Cummings was forced to find a different physical therapist, but filed a lawsuit against Premier Rehab for violating the anti-discrimination rules in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

In her case, as is the case for many Americans who experience discrimination due to their identity, the lawsuit sought damages for emotional distress. Emotional distress damages are often critical to discrimination cases, compensating victims for lasting harms like anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The issue, in this case, was not whether Cummings was discriminated against, but rather what to do in response to the discrimination she faced. The Supreme Court’s answer? Nothing could be done.

For the first time, the court held that emotional distress damages were not recoverable in a private action to enforce anti-discrimination laws. In its argument, the court applied contract law to hold that damages cannot include compensation for emotional suffering since emotional distress damages are not traditionally available in suits of breach of contract.

Despite studies routinely showing that discrimination can cause significant emotional damage, potentially affecting a person’s stress levels, self-esteem, blood pressure, and overall mental health, the court claimed these harms do not warrant a remedy.

The impact of this decision is far reaching. Practically, this decision means that while emotional injury is often the primary, and at times the only, harm caused by discrimination, victims will not be able seek justice.Without emotional distress remedies, many discrimination cases in progress will be thrown out, and future cases will not be taken up by lawyers at all.

While the facts of this case concerned disability discrimination under the Rehabilitation Act and the ACA, its ruling also applies to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (prohibiting race discrimination) and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (prohibiting sex discrimination). This means the decision will affect kids in schools, people who experience sexual harassment and abuse, and many other victims of race and sex discrimination.

Cummings not only prevents these individuals from seeking justice, but also leaves them at greater risk under the weakened anti-discrimination laws. In the past, the strength of these laws has relied on the deterrent effect of lawsuits brought by private actors. Now, many victims will be unable to bring a case, making it all the more difficult to hold violators of these laws accountable.

With this decision, key wins fought for by civil rights activists like Rosa Parks are stripped away. Rosa Parks suffered no economic harm from sitting in the back of the bus. She lost no job. The bus still took her where she needed to go. But the injury she suffered — the indignity and stigma of being segregated and relegated to the back — was real. Now, the court has effectively told Rosa Parks, “So what?”