The National Park Service plans to install 24-hour surveillance video cameras with facial recognition technology at a Philadelphia park where the Trump administration recently installed a new exhibit that replaced one focused on nine enslaved people owned by former President George Washington and his family.
The move, detailed in federal contract filings, comes as the park agency put up new panels at the President’s House, an outdoor installation at Independence National Historical Park where Washington lived while president.
The exhibit at the Philadelphia park has become the most public example of the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape how national parks explain the most troubling part of this country’s history, such as slavery, violence against Native Americans and racism. President Donald Trump at the beginning of his second term signed an order telling the park service to replace exhibits that focused too much on the “negative” parts of U.S. history.
The new exhibit, which was installed last week and explores slavery from a broader and more general perspective than the original, is “creating a lot of security concerns,” Interior officials wrote in a justification of the expedited surveillance project July 16. The plan was first reportedby the Philadelphia Inquirer.
