Meet Baltimore's newest residents: "Lucy," "Princess" and "Crime Fighting Dawg." They are cameras, lovingly named by those weary of living in crime-plagued neighborhoods. The affection, however, is accompanied by an outpouring of protest and indignation.
"We put cameras in our neighborhoods that for generations were experiencing violence and open air drug markets. The cameras are actively monitored in conjunction with crime prevention strategy and since May 2005, we have seen a 16 percent reduction in violent crime," Kristin Mahoney, from the Baltimore City Police Department, explained.
The California Research Bureau's investigation on Public Surveillance as an effective Crime Prevention Tool studies the legal issues surrounding public surveillance. According to the CRB, the two major legislative acts concerning public surveillance, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (1986) and the Fourth Amendment, allow for such monitoring. While a warrant must be obtained to secretly intercept a communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, video surveillance that does not record sound is exempt from the ECPA because the act regulates only surveillance utilizing audio signals.
While a warrant must be obtained to secretly intercept a communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, video surveillance that does not record sounds is exempt from the ECPA because the Act regulates only surveillance that utilizes audio signals.
According to the CRB, public surveillance slips past the Fourth Amendment as well because "What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection, but what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.
Generally a person walking along a public sidewalk or standing in a public park cannot reasonably expect that his activity will be immune from the public eye or from observation by the police."
"The cameras only view what the public can see," Kristin Mahoney explained when asked about privacy issues surrounding the use of camera surveillance. Mahoney added. "The cameras are open to the public and we invite you to come in and view the cameras with us."
Video Surveillance became established in Baltimore in September 1995 through the "Video Patrol Project," a $75,000 endeavor to install a closed circuit network of 80 cameras spread throughout the Inner Harbor.
The cameras were positioned to record activities in public places and were reviewed periodically but not monitored.
A spokesman for the Downtown Partnership, major financier of the "Video Patrol Project," told USA Today that the cameras "led to a 25 percent reduction in crime from 2001 to 2002, the most recent years that data were available."
"The cameras enable monitors to put themselves at a location and experience the exact same sense of order or disorder that a community experiences. The cameras enable us to live there," Mahoney explained in defense of the surveillance project.
Thanks to millions of dollars in grants from Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Justice along with $2.9 million in confiscated drug money, video surveillance has now penetrated most areas of the city.
Surveillance includes 28 microwave cameras installed throughout the Inner Harbor and in police helicopters, fifty closed-circuit cameras along Howard Street and eighty others spread around the Mount Vernon, Greenmount and Park Heights neighborhoods. The cameras carry the inscription, "Baltimore Police Believe 24/7."
In addition 20 pod cameras sporting flashing blue beacons are rotating through high-crime neighborhoods and have become very popular among Baltimore's residents. "Every time we put up a camera that doesn't have that flashing blue light," Mahoney explained, "people don't believe it's a camera, so we had to order flashing blue lights and install them. People love those cameras so much."
The question of whether cameras can transform neighborhoods into haunting reflections of an Orwellian society, or if video surveillance provides useful systems for crime prevention that need not infringe on our everyday lives, has erupted.
