“This effectively is a a mobile citywide scanner”, Smith said.
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If cities can put surveillance cameras on every street corner, if police can use license plate scanners to identify and track vehicles even when they are merely sitting in their owners’ driveways and if cops can fly over a fenced-in backyard to see if someone might be growing marijuana-well, at that point what Persistent Surveillance is doing might be a difference of degree but not of kind. “They said if I was into video games, then I might like this work”.
Others did not fault the program but said it should have been disclosed publicly before it began in January.
Rector and Broadwater write for the Baltimore Sun.
“One of the most troubling things is that it was a secret”, Cummings said.
By contrast, the police department’s body camera program was the subject of news conferences, legislation, a task force, a series of public meetings and public procurement process.
Stanley says that’s a hallow argument, since surveillance systems never stand in isolation. But it is meant to be used by police in conjunction with witness accounts and CitiWatch footage to track movement and help police identify criminals.
“We haven’t had a public accounting of the program”, Davis said.
The program – in which Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems has for months been testing sophisticated surveillance cameras aboard a small Cessna airplane flying high above the city – was disclosed Tuesday by Bloomberg Businessweek, which was given exclusive access to the company’s testing.
“What we are talking about here is not an unmanned drone or a secret surveillance program”, Smith said. He said the hearing would be in September. The arrangement was kept secret in part because it never appeared before the city’s spending board, paid for instead through private donations handled by the nonprofit Baltimore Community Foundation. Among the most startling details in the piece: the same program now being used in Baltimore-and being pitched to other police departments in other major cities-was originally created to catch insurgents planting roadside bombs during the occupation of Iraq. The usage of the planes in Baltimore seems like a trial run before the company tries to market the same program to other cities-McNutt says he’s already approached police departments in 20 different jurisdictions.
When asked at the press conference who else knew about the program if it wasn’t a secret, Smith replied “I can’t answer that”, referring the reporter to the mayor’s office.
While they can only make out dots for people from that altitude, they can look at a specific area at a specific time and follow the movement of someone running from a scene. The city’s network has grown to 696, including cameras at the East Baltimore Development Inc. project and surrounding the Horseshoe Casino.
Residents of Baltimore should be equally outraged that this has happened without their consent or knowledge, though perhaps the city’s long history of intrusive surveillance and abusive policing has numbed the response-being observed from the sky certainly beats getting kicked in the chest (literally), right? He said an expansion of digital surveillance is needed in a city where there were almost 1,000 shootings and a record high in homicides past year. “Indeed, 43% of this year’s killing have occurred in “broad daylight” hours, an apparent gesture of impunity by trigger pullers who expect not to be revealed”.
Ostensibly, the aptly named Persistent Surveillance Systems is about preventing and prosecuting crimes and police have been successfully using it to that effect.
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“We had been looking for a department that’s got the leadership to step up and value what we do”, McNutt said.
