The Screening of America

Crime, cops, and cameras

Brian J. Taylor from the May 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

University of Oklahoma law professor Randall Coyne disagrees. The use of cameras, he argues, is indeed an invasion of privacy. Coyne says the captured images constitute a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

But Coyne's is a lonely voice: There is no apparent organized opposition in the communities that employ surveillance techniques. The only exceptions are local chapters of the ACLU, and none of these is planning a legal challenge.

Do surveillance cameras actually reduce crime? Anecdotal evidence suggests they do--at least in the immediate vicinity of the cameras. But there is reason to believe that crime is not so much reduced as displaced, pushed beyond camera range.

Police departments across Great Britain credit cameras with dramatic crime reduction, citing such impressive results as a 75 percent drop in Airdrie, Scotland, a 68 percent reduction in Glasgow, Scotland, and a 57 percent drop in Northampton, England. But Privacy International, the London-based civil liberties organization, claims the British studies are not methodologically credible. It quotes The British Journal of Criminology, which dismissed British police research methods as "post hoc shoestring efforts by the untrained and self interested practitioner."

While there are few American studies in this relatively new research area, Jeff Fryrear of the National Crime Prevention Institute does give surveillance measures a qualified endorsement as crime-fighting tools. CCTV, he says, can be effective in specific strategic locations to thwart a specific type of crime, but he is reluctant to credit the cameras with the power of cutting total crime levels.

Baltimore's business community and law enforcement officials are pleased with the results of their program and plan to saturate the downtown area with 200 cameras. Police Maj. Peter McMahon, whose district the cameras are in, compared crime incidents in a three- month period before and after the cameras were installed. He found a 50 percent reduction after installation. But to determine whether crime was simply being pushed into other neighborhoods, he looked at the entire downtown area, finding a more modest decrease of 4 percent. He attributed this smaller drop to the use of cameras, too. But with crime rates decreasing nationally, largely in areas not using surveillance cameras, this is a far from obvious conclusion.

The results from Tacoma's experiment are even less clear. Police reported an initial crime reduction in the Hilltop neighborhood after installing cameras in 1993. Crime rates later rebounded, although they remained below previous levels.

"Cockroaches scatter when exposed to light,"observes law professor Coyne. "Unless we wire the country from coast to coast, it will do nothing."He also notes that convenience stores and banks continue to get robbed, even though most of them employ cameras. Gray, the Tacoma community leader, acknowledges that pushing the drug trade out of her neighborhood will have an impact on the surrounding area: "We're not getting rid of anything,"she says. "We're moving it around."

But even if crime rates are not lowered, recorded surveillance camera images make possible such creative and unprecedented practices as "retrospective arrest."In England, for example, disgruntled soccer fans caused a melee in downtown Newcastle in May 1996. After reviewing video surveillance tapes, police isolated 152 faces, arresting nine of the offenders immediately. They then allowed a local newspaper to publish the faces of 80 others. In a few days, they had all been identified, some by turning themselves in. (In Baltimore, tapes are kept for 96 hours before they are erased, unless they contain evidence of criminal activity; no tapes are made in Tacoma.)

While Newcastle business owners no doubt welcomed the arrests, the very act of recording surveillance tapes can be troubling. Take the notorious case of the British video, Caught in the Act, a compilation of violence, sex in elevators, and odd behavior that was captured by surveillance technology and made commercially available.

According to a "researcher"for the tape quoted last year in The Washington Post, video footage in the tape was purchased from insurance companies, private security companies, and local government officials. It was such a hot seller that two similar tapes were shortly released. Despite reports of a voluntary ban on releasing surveillance footage, Privacy International's David Banisar says there is active videotape exchanging in London. As the growth in surveillance continues, Coyne expects to see similar, more gratuitous use of videotapes on TV shows like Hard Copy. Already, shows like Real TV and Rescue 911--not to mention pedestrian nightly newscasts--show footage of convenience store shootings and restaurant robberies taken from surveillance cameras.

Banisar claims that British police are using videotapes to crack down on such minor infractions as juvenile smoking. Indeed, a promotional booklet issued by the British Home Office recommends the use of CCTV to combat drunkenness, racial and sexual harassment, loitering, and disorderly behavior.

Closer to home, Tacoma's cameras have been directly responsible for hundreds of arrests, says patrol officer Chris Pollard, most of them for drug violations, or drinking or urinating in public. The cameras are also used to see if anyone is violating a restraining order and to read license plates to check for stolen cars.

Police cameras pointing up and down an increasing number of city streets raise the specter of a technologically powered surveillance state. If such measures continue to proliferate, law enforcement officials, well meaning and otherwise, might be tempted to use cameras and listening devices creatively, as indeed voyeuristic security personnel and spying employers monitoring bathrooms and dressing rooms have already been known to do. It wouldn't be difficult to tilt cameras off the street and toward a window, to alter listening devices on street lights for purposes of eavesdropping, or to videotape and catalog the faces of those attending meetings and demonstrations.

Already, police are tracing the license plate numbers of cars photographed driving down Hollywood's Yucca Street and sending letters to the owners informing them their cars have been spotted in a known drug trafficking area. Tacoma's Gray says her community is starting a program to do the same thing.