Member-only story
Calling Police Investigations ‘Contact Tracing’ Could Block Efforts to Stop Covid-19
Privacy fears may keep people from downloading proximity apps
After the May 25 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer was recorded and streamed on Facebook, protests against police brutality erupted across the city.
Following days of demonstrations last week, Minneapolis police and the Minnesota State Patrol arrested dozens of protesters. On May 30, in a televised press conference that was also broadcast on Twitter, Minnesota Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said that law enforcement had begun “contact tracing” those taken into custody.
“We’ve begun making arrests,” Harrington said. “We’ve begun analyzing the data of who we’ve arrested. We’ve begun doing, almost similar to our Covid [work]. It’s contact tracing. Who are they associated with? What platforms are they advocating for?”
He used the term “contact tracing” as an analogy; in reality, he was referring to routine police work. But the damage had been done. The news that Minnesota authorities were carrying out contact tracing on demonstrators swept Twitter, tapping into fears that a tool intended to track cases of the coronavirus could be abused by police. Now, public health experts worry that Harrington’s misleading remarks could undermine both traditional and digital contact tracing efforts to stop the spread of Covid-19.
“It was an unfortunate use of the term,” Sarah Kreps, a professor of government and law at Cornell University who studies surveillance systems, told OneZero.
Contact tracing is an established public health practice that involves interviewing someone who tested positive for an infectious disease in order to identify and notify others who may have come into contact with that person. People who have been potentially exposed are encouraged to self-quarantine at home to avoid infecting others, making contact tracing an important public health tool for containing disease outbreaks. Now, states are hiring contact tracers by the thousands to call and text individuals at risk of getting sick with Covid-19. A total of 184,000 contact tracers could be needed in the United States, according to researchers at the…
