If you want privacy, you better stay home

Last month, video surveillance cameras in certain Maryland jurisdictions started to monitor speeding vehicles. The devices were added to poles on street corners that also held red-light cameras. Nearby, in some places, even more cameras rolled 24/7 to detect drug dealing and violent crime.

Police officials here say, get used to it.

Long used in Britain, where more than a million surveillance cameras have turned parts of the country into what some call “Spy Central,” the video crime-fighting trend has landed on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay — and beyond.

“They are incredibly valuable to the police department as a force multiplier,” said Anthony Guglielmi, spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department. “They give us an opportunity to keep an eye on the city and allow us to immediately dispatch officers to problem areas.”

The benefits of surveillance cameras to law enforcement both locally and internationally include response time to a crime scene and suspect identification, Guglielmi said.

Other uses for the cameras are widespread. Kansas is considering them for prison vehicles to detect whether guards were having sex with female inmates. In Northern Virginia, Fairfax County high school cafeterias rely on them to keep hungry students from stealing food.

And there are others:

• Baltimore County police used video surveillance footage last week to arrest two additional suspects in a fatal shooting during the July robbery of Putty Hill Liquors.
• In Rome, police released video surveillance photos last week of what they say was a gangland-style shooting by an unmasked assailant outside a coffee shop in Naples.
• In Los Angeles, police released surveillance videos last week from the Staples Center and two downtown hotels of a scam artist believed to have stolen $26,000 from an Israeli basketball team in town to play an exhibition game against the Los Angeles Clippers.

The British system of video surveillance is based on an intricate web of closed cable television monitors that are placed all over London. The CCTV cameras perpetually revolve, shooting footage at 360 degrees, sending images of the city to scan across screens monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Danielle Citron, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law who is an expert on privacy, technology and the law, said studies have shown that those British cameras don’t necessarily stem violent crime.

“Their rate of violent of crimes has not increased with the cameras,” Citron explained. “What they have shown is that the cameras tend to push the crime to where there are no cameras.”

Citron said the proliferation of video surveillance cameras locally and across the U.S. is one byproduct of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And everyday people are more accepting of them as a result of the heightened security measures.

“It may be that we remain steadfast to the notion that government can do this,” she said. “It may just change who we are. We live our lives in naked ways online already.”

“The law is that there is no protection [on privacy grounds] because we are in public,” she continued. That means, ultimately, that people are likely to change their actions because of the surveillance cameras.

“The sense that we are being watched impacts the way we operate,” Citron said. “With speed cameras, people will drive safer, but at the same time, it can stifle creativity.”

Kirby Fowler, president of the Downtown Partnership in Baltimore, said federal Homeland Security funds have helped pay for installation of 75 surveillance cameras in center city since 2005 — not the type with the flashing blue lights as seen in other city communities. Having the slender white cameras mounted on multiple downtown street corners and trained on street-level areas has been positive from a crime-fighting standpoint.

“The cameras have resulted in the arrests of 675 people in downtown alone,” Fowler said. “And as a result, our downtown violent crime numbers are down 34 percent. There are more eyes and ears out on the street because of the increased foot traffic in downtown, but the cameras also deserve credit.”

Fowler said the downtown system is modeled after the British CCTV system, studied by then-Mayor Martin O’Malley on a trip to London before he was elected governor.

Guglielmi said city police officials are moving toward replacing existing cameras with CCTV models.

“Ten years from now, maybe we’ll be able to use license plate readers on cameras and read the tags of stolen vehicles driving around the city,” Guglielmi said.

“It increases our public safety options,” he said. “We also hope to use the cameras as face-recognition tools. Right now, we have a rapist on the loose in Baltimore City. Imagine how we could work to identify suspects out there based on composite sketches from victims with the face recognition from cameras.”

Melody Simmons is a freelance writer based in Baltimore.