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They're watching you: Police cameras in the City of Brotherly Love
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
They're watching you: Police cameras in the City of Brotherly Love
Friend of the Clog Brian James Kirk is running an interesting series over on ex-Inky columnist Tom Ferrick's Metropolis Web site this week, looking at the widespread use of surveillance video cameras by Philadelphia police. Check out part one here, and part two here. Part three, Brian tells me, should be up later today.
In any event, here's a sample:
When it comes to fighting crime, Philadelphia is undergoing a video revolution. Within a few short years, the city is likely to be blanketed by a network of more than a thousand state-of-the-art, high resolution cameras, scanning high-crime areas, critical structures such as the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, SEPTA stops and inner city streets.
The sweeping program had a modest beginning. In 2007, Mayor John Street and the Philadelphia Police Department announced a $10 million initiative to install 250 surveillance cameras around the city. These are high resolution Unisys digital video cameras that, if perched on a street light, can pan, tilt and zoom into details, such as a person's face or a license plate number, from a full city block away.
Today, 117 of the planned 250 cameras are in operation, perched above streets with their tell-tale blue lights blinking. Another 76 are covered by plastic bags awaiting network configuration.
But this is only the beginning. The number of cameras on the network is expected to expand exponentially in the near future. City officials are working on ways to link their Police Department operation with surveillance cameras used by such parties as SEPTA, local universities and private businesses to create a super-network of public space surveillance that can feed images back to the video monitoring room at Police Headquarters at Eighth and Race Sts.
These cameras, Brian writes, allow cops to zoom in on things like faces and license plates from up to a block away. Go take a read, it's worth a few minutes of your time. While you're at it, bear in mind that while the cops love taking pictures of you, they may well arrest you for reciprocating.
The sad part is they don't act as a good deterrent from crime, nor does it work too well in terms of getting criminals in some studies I've seen of the camera systems in England. It's almost like a giant expensive security blanket to some degree. I'd rather just have more well-trained officers on street.
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