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Chicago
moving to 'smart' surveillance cameras "Cameras
are the equivalent of hundreds of sets of eyes," Daley said
when he unveiled the new project this month. "They're the next
best things to having police officers stationed at every potential
trouble spot." Police
specialists here can already monitor live footage from about 2,000
surveillance cameras around the city, so the addition of 250 cameras
under the mayor's new plan is not a great jump. The way these
cameras will be used, however, is an extraordinary technological
leap. Sophisticated
new computer programs will immediately alert the police whenever
anyone viewed by any of the cameras placed at buildings and other
structures considered terrorist targets wanders aimlessly in
circles, lingers outside a public building, pulls a car onto the
shoulder of a highway, or leaves a package and walks away from it.
Images of those people will be highlighted in color at the city's
central monitoring station, allowing dispatchers to send police
officers to the scene immediately. Officials
here designed the system after studying the video surveillance
network in London, which became a world leader in this technology
during the period when Irish terrorists were active. The Chicago
officials also studied systems used in Las Vegas casinos, as well as
those used by Army combat units. The system they have devised, they
say, will be the most sophisticated in the United States and perhaps
the world. "What
we're doing is a totally new concept," said Ron Huberman,
executive director of the city's office of emergency management and
communications. "This is a very innovative way to harness the
power of cameras. It's going to take us to a whole new level." Many
cities have installed large numbers of surveillance cameras along
streets and near important buildings, but as the number of these
cameras has grown, it has become impossible to monitor all of them.
The software that will be central to Chicago's surveillance system
is designed to direct specialists to screens that show anything
unusual happening. Huberman, a 32-year-old former police officer who
is also what one aide called a "techno geek," said this
new system "should produce a significant decrease in crime, and
from a homeland security standpoint it should be able to make our
city safer." When
the system is in place, Huberman said, video images will be
instantly available to dispatchers at the city's 911 emergency
center, which receives about 18,000 calls each day. Dispatchers will
be able to tilt or zoom the cameras, some of which magnify images up
to 400 times, in order to watch suspicious people and follow them
from one camera's range to another's. A
spokesman for the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties
Union, Edwin C. Yohnka, said the new system was "really a huge
expansion of the city's surveillance program." "With
the aggressive way these types of surveillance equipment are being
marketed and implemented," Yohnka said, "it really does
raise questions about what kind of society do we ultimately want,
and how intrusive we want law enforcement officials to be in all of
our lives." The surveillance network will embrace cameras
placed not only by the police department, but also by a variety of
city agencies including the transit, housing and aviation
authorities. Private companies that maintain their own surveillance
of areas around their buildings will also be able to send their
video feeds to the central control room that is being built at a
fortified city building. The
250 new cameras, along with the new system that dispatchers will use
to monitor them, are to be in place by the spring of 2006. A $5.1
million federal grant will be used to pay for the cameras, and the
city will add $3.5 million to pay for the computer network that will
connect them. This project is a central part of Chicago's response
to the threat of terrorism, as well as an effort to reduce the
city's crime rate. It also subjects people here to extraordinary
levels of surveillance. Anyone walking in public is liable to be
almost constantly watched. "The
value we gain in public safety far outweighs any perception by the
community that this is Big Brother who's watching," Huberman
said. "The feedback we're getting is that people welcome this.
It makes them feel safer." One
community organizer who works in a high-crime neighborhood, Ernest
R. Jenkins, chairman of the West Side Association for Community
Action, said the 2,000 cameras now in place had reduced crime and
were "having an impact, no if's, and's or but's about it."
Nonetheless, Jenkins said, some people in Chicago believed the city
was trying to "infiltrate people's privacy in the name of
terrorist attacks." "I just personally think that it's an
invasion of people's privacy," Jenkins said of the new video
surveillance project. "A large increase in the utilization of
these cameras would over saturate the market." City
officials counter that the cameras will monitor only public spaces.
Rather than curb the system's future expansion, they have raised the
possibility of placing cameras in commuter and rapid transit cars
and on the city's street-sweeping vehicles. "We're
not inside your home or your business," Mayor Daley said.
"The city owns the sidewalks. We own the streets and we own the
alleys." Do the city officials have the better part of this argument or the Civil Rights advocates? Which have the moral high ground in post-9/11 America? Is there a problem with the 4th Amendment?
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