Sometimes it feels like somebody’s watching me
Chicagoist reports that the city is installing 100 new surveillance cameras in high-crime neighborhoods. Apparently, these new cameras are a little different from previous onesÃ¢â‚¬â€ťthey’re not trying to be so obvious:
The new cameras will look like a streetlight, weigh just 15 pounds, and cost 80-percent less than the 200 exisiting cameras in giant boxes with flashing blue lights.
It reminds me of one of the cases I helped investigate in D.C. It was a typical streetcorner bust: A handful of young black kids were hanging out on a neighborhood corner on a nice afternoon. Cops claim they had a hidden surveillance post (they did not specify whether it was human or electronic) that saw the kids making movements like they were exchanging money for drugs. So the cops roll up, jump out, and pat everybody down. They find nothing except very tip of an old marijuana cigarette on the ground near the boys. We’re talking a miniscule amount of very old pot here and this is a neighborhood where there is drug paraphernalia everywhere (mostly the tiny zips that usually contain crack and cocaine). The cops have no idea if this tiny bit of pot has any connection with these kids, but they’re determined to arrest someone so they pick our guy.
When I went down there to investigate, the kid was out on a PR (personal recognizance) bond (something that never happens where I live now; here you either pay bond or sit in jail until you plead or go to trial; long story). Anyway, we go to the corner and the guy is showing me how it all went down. We’re trying to figure out where the cops could have been hiding when they were supposedly conducting their surveillance, but there’s no obvious place. The guy points across the street to a streetlight and tells me that sometimes there’s a red light on top of that streetlight and everyone in the neighborhood thinks it’s a camera. It looked just like a normal streetlight to me; I thought the kid was probably just being paranoid. Now that I know Chicago is installing cameras that look like streetlights, I have to wonder…
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
October 4th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Oh my god you have NO IDEA. For one of my classes we took a trip to the 911 call center in Chicago, so I’ve been in the room where they have all the screens for all the cameras. And aside from the blue-light “obvious” ones that are meant to be visible to deter crime, there are HUNDREDS of cameras that you’d never know are there. The guys working in the board went into all kinds of detail about what huge percentage of major city streets they could zoom in on at any time and then asked me my address, looked up my corner, and zoomed in on it so close that we could read the writing on the sweatshirt of a guy standing in front of the bodega. It was the freakiest thing I’ve ever seen.