Under surveillance: Camera's cut crime - but city's plans, civil liberties in soft focus

SIMONE WEICHSELBAUM & DAVID GAMBACORTA / Philadelphia Inquirer | July 12 2006

BALTIMORE -The blue blinking light seemed so successful in chasing away the seedy, gun-toting thugs who sell drugs and rob the innocent that Philadelphia politicians flocked here to catch a glimpse.

Mayor Street and Philadelphia City Council members came to Baltimore, where police proudly showed how one little blinking surveillance camera helped transform a grungy East Baltimore corner.

Residents told them that they finally could sit on their steps or ride their bikes. "We don't hear gunshots anymore; we don't have to dodge for cover," they said, according to Baltimore Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm.

Philadelphia voters appeared to listen to the ringing endorsement. They approved a referendum in May supporting the use of police video-surveillance cameras to monitor city streets.

Two months later, the mega-sized project remains in its infancy stages, police said.

Police officials haven't determined which equipment to buy until they finish researching other cities that have anti-crime cameras. They don't know how much the system will cost, who will pay for it or which neighborhoods will receive the first cameras.

Police likely will install the cameras in the city's most violent areas, using crime statistics as a guide, Commissioner Sylvester Johnson said. Neighborhoods in Southwest and North Philadelphia and West Kensington appear to be front-runners for the program because they have had more shooting victims between 2002 and 2005 than other neighborhoods, according to police statistics.

Meanwhile, residents of New York, Chicago and Wilmington already are living under watchful lenses.

Mayoral spokesman Joe Grace said that there is no timeline for installing video cameras here. But he stressed that other cameras are already entrenched in the city.

"Video cameras are everywhere," Grace said. "They are in ATMs, shopping stores. University of Pennsylvania has them."

Penn officials said they have 76 cameras throughout their West Philadelphia campus. A Temple University spokesperson said 285 cameras monitor Temple's campus.

The School District of Philadelphia said it has about 2,500 cameras installed inside and outside district buildings.

Even SEPTA uses federal funds to place digital color cameras in train stations.

The idea of Philadelphia getting outfitted with surveillance cameras has long been a no-brainer to District Attorney Lynne Abraham.

"I'm not only optimistic, but extraordinarily hopeful and delighted that this is being done," Abraham said.

But the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania disagrees.

"There is a downside to the cameras," said Larry Frankel, the ACLU's legislative director. "We lose our sense of freedom and the joys of anonymity.

"Just because they might make us more safe doesn't mean we should buy into this right away. When people feel [cameras] watching them, it will be a less pleasant society to live in."

The D.A. doesn't see it that way.

"The wailing by the ACLU that this is an invasion of privacy is a bunch of baloney. There's surveillance everywhere," Abraham said, citing the proliferation of surveillance cameras in places like those mentioned by Grace. "The government's first obligation is to keep our citizens safe," she said. "Everything else is secondary."

Cameras eliminate the mystery, Abraham said. "You can discern a whole lot about the mindset of a criminal when you see their operation right on tape."

Few can argue with the success that police-monitored street cameras have had in other cities.

A surveillance-camera program was launched in Wilmington in 2001 to monitor the city's downtown businesses. Monitored jointly by cops and Downtown Visions, an independent company, the cameras are popular with residents that the program has expanded throughout the city.

The city's 25 cameras have led to 500 arrests and helped police in about 900 incidents, including the arrest of a suspected murderer in early May, said Dean Vietra, of Downtown Visions.

Baltimore officially launched its program during spring 2005, and now more than 250 cameras are attached to light poles across the city.

More than 2,000 cameras monitor Chicago's streets and O'Hare International Airport.

And cops in New York announced in March that they will spend $9 million on about 500 wireless pole cameras citywide.

Police Commissioner Johnson said he is eagerly awaiting the moment when Philadelphia joins the ranks, but added that the cameras "won't change everything."

They are a "tool that we can use," said Johnson after his return from Baltimore.

Philly's top cop acknowledged that he was skeptical at first about the city's need for a multi-million-dollar surveillance system. Johnson said his trip to Baltimore - and a one-on-one chat with Baltimore's Commissioner Hamm - won him over.

"He told me this worked," said Johnson, recalling the conversation. "I respect his opinion. Baltimore is not too much different than Philadelphia."

Thanks to the cameras, change has been startling on Lillian Gradison's East Baltimore street corner in an area that police called "historically violent."

For years, the 68-year-old great-grandmother was too afraid to cross the intersection of Ashland and Montford Avenues.

Throngs of boys, ranging in age from about 11 to 17, used to crowd the corner and taunt her as she hurried past, calling her nosy and teasing that she'd call the police. "They weren't lying," she said, " 'cause they knew I would."

Now there are no more clusters of thugs. No more drug addicts streaming in and out of alleyways, Gradison said.

"Beautiful," Gradison beamed, describing her life since the cameras came to her block.

"I love every bit of it."

Philadelphia officials listened to similar reviews from Gradison's friends when they visited her block during their April tour.

Drug-forfeiture money and contributions from the Department of Homeland Security paid for Baltimore's $10-million camera program, officials said. But taxpayers will have to pick up the estimated $600,000 annual tab to keep the cameras rolling.

Johnson, who already struggles with a cash-strapped police budget, said he also plans to seek drug-forfeiture money along with Department of Homeland Security grants.

"We are trying to get as much outside funding as we can," he said.

Johnson has studied Baltimore's surveillance program to determine how to structure Philadelphia's. Baltimore uses both fixed and portable cameras.

About 170 fixed cameras, known as "hardwires," are permanently mounted atop light poles in six of the nine Baltimore police districts. The hardwires cost $25,000 apiece.

"We put a camera in the area we are concerned about," said Baltimore's Hamm. His department uses crime trends and intelligence to determine where they should mount the cameras.

Patrol cops are stationed near the cameras, and the recorded images are monitored inside police stations across the city, usually by retired police officers. The images are stored for 30 days on computer hard drives.

The blue-lit camera across from Lillian Gradison's rowhouse is quite different. That device, nicknamed "the pod," is portable and cost $20,000, police said.

Officers view the pod's images from a screen enclosed in a black briefcase inside their squad cars. One briefcase can link to many nearby pods.

Cops said they generally place pods in areas where residents say a camera is immediately needed. Only pods, and not fixed cameras, feature the flashing blue light. Police said the pod's main goal is to quickly quell crime.

Still, not everyone on Baltimore's Ashland Avenue echoed Gradison's love of the new light.

Because the camera faces the entrance of Mama's Grocery, which is across from Gradison's rowhouse, shop owner Linda So said she wished police would move the camera to another spot.

"Business half down," So said in a thick Korean accent. So, 54, has owned the store for 29 years.

Since the pod's arrival to the block, young men no longer cluster around her shop's front door.

And that baggy-pants-wearing crowd was a big percentage of her clientele, she said.

So begged a police official standing inside her store to move the camera. "Why don't you move it?" she said. "Please. Please."

Baltimore police said they have seen an average 17 percent drop in crime in the areas where the cameras were installed.

And when cops can't stop a thug from doing wrong, having a camera recording the illegal act helps in the investigation.

About 8 p.m. Oct. 17, two groups of young men were spotted hanging outside two East Baltimore rowhouses.

The image was slightly fuzzy, but a viewer could see a man in a yellow T-shirt amble down the street. The man stopped midway down the block and pulled out a gun, aiming the barrel at his victim, police said. Three to four bright flashes popped out of the gun. The victim ran inside a house. The gunman walked away. Bystanders scattered.

A fixed camera recorded the drama. Baltimore detectives used the video to track the other man on the block who watched the ordeal, said Deputy Major Thomas J. Cassella.

"It helped us to put the case together a lot quicker," Cassella said. "The camera helped us to piece together who was there.

"But the victim refused to pick out the shooter. The case is now stalled," he said.

More than 1,400 arrests based on camera images have been made since January, Cassella said. The majority of the arrests have been for minor crimes (carrying marijuana, littering, etc.), according to Baltimore prosecutors.

Margaret Burns, spokeswoman for the Baltimore prosecutor's office, calculated that from December through May, only one of every six arrests made through use of the cameras resulted in a guilty verdict.

She blamed the low number of convictions on the "grainy" images the cameras usually produce. Burns said prosecutors have a hard time telling the difference between a "cigarette and a blunt" when watching a recording.

"The city is too poor" to support citywide camera use, said Burns. "The city is too violent" to use a surveillance system that mainly targets quality-of-life crimes such as vagrancy, panhandling and public urination.

The dream of catching crooks on tape - or better yet, scaring them away before they commit crimes - already plays out on a quiet, narrow Kensington street in one of Philadelphia's worst drug areas.

Residents say that gunfire erupts almost daily on Westmoreland near Gransback Street and that drug dealers sometimes seem to outnumber neighbors.

Yet, crime doesn't come to Gransback Street, and neighbors thank three sets of video cameras installed by Jay and Sue Wiley, who founded Top Cat Town Watch nearly two decades ago.

The Wileys have a camera nailed at each side of their two-story brick rowhouse next to the second-floor windows. One lens points east, the other west. The images appear on two television sets next to the Wileys' front door inside their living room.

Eight-hour VCR tapes record the data. Jay Wiley said he reuses a tape unless a crime is recorded. When that occurs he gives the tape to police.

"The cameras do work," said Wiley, 43. "Everybody should have them. But the criminals won't like it."

Over the years, his cameras have filmed a shooting, a robbery and numerous vandalism attempts. It's unclear if his tapes have led to arrests.

Wiley's mother, who lives a few houses down from him, uses a video-surveillance system. So does a neighbor at the opposite end of the block.

Not everyone on Gransback Street supports Wiley's attempts.

Jennifer Carlin, 28, who lives across from the Wileys, said that although the cameras help to reduce crime, she believes that cops will abuse their newfound Big Brother-like powers.

"You can't trust every single cop," she said. "They are just as bad as regular people."

As for thugs and drug dealers, "they will always find a way around it. They know how to work around the city," she said.

"They are not dumb."

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