Police Reported Ahead

I was driving on the Interstate in an unfamiliar city over the holidays.  I had the GPS on my phone patched through the car stereo, giving me directions to my destination, but I wasn't expecting to hear one thing it suddenly announced: "Police Reported Ahead."

Sure enough, a few minutes later I passed an obvious speed trap.  My first thought: well, that technology would have made things a hell of a lot easier for the Bandit.

My second thought: who exactly did the reporting?  Are there drivers actually logging in to Google Maps, or whatever app I was using (I lose track sometimes) to report police activity?  Or does the thing somehow detect when people using it are pulled over?

I don't know why I found it so surprising.  It prompted thoughts I've had before, about how the very concept of privacy is falling by the wayside.  In this particular case, the omnipresent phone and all it represents may be working to foil police action, but far more often, we find that we've created a world where we take it for granted that our every action is monitored, our every utterance heard, our every message and transaction recorded somewhere.

The vast majority of people in society today willingly carry around a device that makes it possible to know where we go, how long we stay there, who else was present, and a great deal of what happened.  We're not just willing to carry these devices around--a lot of us would get violently upset if they were taken away.

Cash is disappearing from society, displaced by digital transactions that make anonymity essentially impossible.  Want to buy a beer at your local sporting event?  It's increasingly likely that your bank will know about it immediately.  It's not hard to imagine a world where the bank lets your car know how much you've had to drink, so it can decide whether to let you drive.

Security cameras, facial recognition technology, drones--good luck escaping them.  Leave some DNA at a crime scene a few decades ago?  You'd better hope none of your close relatives send a sample in for DNA testing.

We can applaud a lot of this--the Golden State Killer was arrested because a relative sent some DNA to a genetic testing service--while still finding the disappearance of privacy troubling.  From what I can tell, it's already something the younger generations of today don't even think about.  Having grown up in a digital world that's been harvesting data about them since they were toddlers, they regard the notion of a private life as akin to the notion of a horse and buggy.  It's cute, but it's simply not part of the reality they live in.

For we crime writers, this presents some special challenges.  I love the Parker novels by Richard Stark (which is to say, by Donald Westlake), but almost none of the heists that master thief Parker and his cronies pull off would be possible in today's world.  Entirely aside from the inescapable surveillance, there just aren't that many places any longer with giant piles of cash waiting to be stolen.  Today's master thieves use laptops, not handguns.  Not nearly as much fun to read about, and no fun at all to write.

Think about some of your favorite noir and crime films made prior to, say, 1990.  How many of them have plots that would still work if everybody had a cell phone?

So what's a poor crime writer to do?  One solution is to set stories in the past, which is something I've done a lot.  Frankly, it's something of a relief to write about a world where people still read newspapers, go to the library to do research, and sometimes get a busy signal when they try to use the phone.

Of course, the other option is to use our imaginations, recognizing that, however much the world has changed, people still commit murders, still take things that don't belong to them, and are still haunted by the mistakes they've made in the past.  I'm honored to have had stories in all five volumes to date of the superb anthology series MICKEY FINN: 21ST CENTURY NOIR, created and edited by fellow SleuthSayer Michael Bracken, who takes that subtitle seriously.  He wants stories set in the present day, with killers and crooks and PIs who have cell phones, and reading any edition of the series will demonstrate that it's still possible to tell compelling stories set in that world--which is to say, our world.

None of which prevents me from regarding this new age of surveillance with suspicion, or feeling nostalgic for the time before.  When I was twelve years old, I'd often get on my bicycle and be gone from home all day.  I didn't have a phone.  I didn't even have much cash.  Nobody knew where I was or what I was doing.  Today, for most families, that would be unthinkable.

But doesn't it also sound a little bit wonderful?