Lancaster, California Rolls Out Law Enforcement Surveillance Tech The Right Way -- By Involving The Public

from the you-know,-the-little-people-who-pay-your-salaries dept

Recently we covered another example of law enforcement's "deploy first, check with public later" attitude towards new surveillance technology. The Los Angeles Sheriff's Dept. had partnered with Persistent Surveillance Systems to keep an eye on the entire city of Compton utilizing a plane armed with a cluster of high-powered cameras. Rather surprisingly, the LASD offered no defense of its decision to run this by the public it serves. Instead, it simply informed the public that their input was hardly conducive to its widespread surveillance plans.

“The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,” (LASD Sgt.) Iketani said. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush.”

That's the LASD's public-facing policy, apparently. If it thinks you might have a problem with new surveillance, it just won't tell you until after it's in use. On the bright side, the powerful cameras aren't quite powerful enough… yet. This pilot program has been discontinued, not out of privacy concerns, but because the resolution just isn't high enough to be useful.

The cameras, despite a total 192 million pixels of resolution, sweep such a wide area that each individual appears as a single pixel - not nearly discerning enough to detect race, sex or other distinguishing characteristics, [Persistent Surveillance Solutions president Ross] McNutt said.

In its stead, the LASD is rolling out more cameras at ground level.

Compton rejected the aerial observation, in part, because it had already been satisfied with the results it got from video cameras it had installed in nine city parks, said City Manager Harold Duffey. The 15 cameras helped thwart crime enough that the city is in the midst of planning a program to install about 75 cameras along major thoroughfares at a cost of $2.7 million.

The previously-installed cameras were deployed as yet another excuse for not telling the public about the high-flying camera cluster.

"Citizens weren't notified because cameras were already installed in Compton on the ground," said Nicole Nishida, a Sheriff's Department spokeswoman.

Got it. Any new surveillance tech can now be rolled out without notifying the public because surveillance tech already exists. Perhaps the new camera system is being installed by Recursive Surveillance Solutions.

But it doesn't have to be handled this way. Obviously, law enforcement is like nearly every other entity: the path of least resistance is usually the one most traveled. If cutting out the public means deploying the technology you'd like to have in place, then all apologies and privacy considerations can be handled weeks, months or years down the road. As the DOJ itself has stated, civil liberties are nothing more than Get Out of Jail Free cards for criminals.

Lancaster, CA also instituted some new aerial surveillance. But the city decided a more open process might be welcomed by those on the receiving end of law enforcement's new capabilities.

Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris said that the city was happy with its system and that alerting the public led to more acceptance.

"Initially, there was a lot of concerns of Big Brother in the sky. But now the feeling is it is reassuring when it is up there. People got quite upset when it was down for a time for technical problems," he said.

"It's important to be as transparent as possible with these decisions," he said.

Lancaster's system covers a much narrower area and is only deployed by local law enforcement under certain conditions. It's not persistent and is usually deployed to accidents or crime scenes. This limited scope and usage is likely a direct result of including the public as stakeholders in their own surveillance. The natural tendency of law enforcement is to gravitate towards a wider scope and fewer limitations.

Cutting the public out may have resulted in something more resembling Compton's pilot project. Instead, it became a system many of the citizens view as useful, helpful and at least indirectly related to their safety. The only way Lancaster can lose now is if the Sheriff's Dept. abuses its technology. But it's less likely to do so now that it's had public input, a process that humanizes those who have concerns about persistent surveillance. It ensures they are treated with more respect, rather than just assumed to be either a.) criminals or b.) crazy.

This also works in the other direction, humanizing those deploying the surveillance, most of whom are probably good people who just want to do their job well. Transparency does truly work both ways, and those charged with protecting the public are better off having them on their side, rather than simply pushing forward with pervasive surveillance and generating more antagonism.

Filed Under: california, lancaster, police, public, surveillance

Lancaster Cops Still Unclear On Public's Right To Record; Harass Same Citizen Who Recorded Them Last Week

from the there's-a-culture-problem-here dept

Apparently, the statement from a Lancaster, PA police spokesman that citizens are allowed to film on-duty police officers hasn't made its way to the entire staff yet. Carlos Miller at PINAC reports that Paul Dejesus, the same man who had an officer walk away from taking an accident report because he was being filmed, was again approached by a police officer who demanded he stop filming because recording his voice "violated" Pennsylvania's wiretapping laws.

Less than a week after a Pennsylvania man posted a video showing a Lancaster cop refusing to take an accident report because the man insisted on his nephew recording the interaction, a story that was picked up by a national technology site as well as the local newspaper, another Lancaster police officer threatened to arrest the man on wiretapping charges, indicating a clear pattern of abuse of authority when it comes to the Constitutionally protected act of recording cops in public.

Fortunately, Paul Dejesus knew his rights and was not afraid to assert them, even after the cop gave up on the wiretapping threat and began threatening him with disorderly conduct, which is the usual catch-all charge for contempt of cop.

But Dejesus slapped that threat down by pointing out he was recording from his own yard.

But if he was recording from a public sidewalk, he still wouldn't have been guilty of disorderly conduct in that state.

The officer tries a little ad hoc prior restraint by shining his flashlight at Dejesus' camera, a tactic that's deployed frequently by cops wishing to stay unrecorded.


These actions directly contradict the statement given by police spokeman Sgt. William Hickey.

"It is not illegal to film police in the course of their duties, as long as you are not interfering with them doing their job..."

City officers are instructed during ongoing in-service sessions that citizens are allowed to film them doing their jobs, Hickey says.

Case law has established that right, and officers should not inform a citizen otherwise, Hickey says.

"It's reasonable to expect, at any given time, anybody could be filmed," Hickey says. "There are traffic cameras, cameras at ATMs, even most of our patrol vehicles are equipped with dash cams.

"You are under surveillance no matter where you go."

Hickey's not lying about the surveillance. Lancaster is somewhat infamous for the number of surveillance cameras it has installed, which surpasses the number installed by many larger cities like San Francisco and Boston. Not only that, but the system is manned by volunteers including, at one point, someone who had been convicted of stalking, harassment and impersonating a public official.

The fact that everyone in Lancaster is "under surveillance" (from the mouth of the PD PR himself) means that the police, who "benefit" from this camera system, are the last people who should be granting themselves an "expectation of privacy" in order to wave off pesky citizens and their recording devices.

These cops backed off when the usual stuff didn't work, but there's obviously still a disconnect between the PD spokesman's calming statements and the actual attitude of the rank-and-file.

Filed Under: harassment, lancaster, police, recording police, surveillance, wiretapping

Convicted Stalker Was Approved By Lancaster To Manage Surveillance Cameras

from the oops dept

A few months back, we wrote about how the town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, not only had installed more surveillance cameras than many large cities, but was also allowing resident volunteers to control the cameras, which seemed to raise quite a few questions about the potential for abuse. The town insisted it was fine, because even though the screening process was "informal" it planned to "weed out voyeurs and anyone who might use the tapes for blackmail or other illegal activity." Apparently that weeding process needs a bit of work. Someone who prefers to be anonymous notes that it took a third party to notice that one of the residents approved to control the cameras had been convicted of stalking and harassment, as well as impersonating a public official, in the past. Oddly, the newspaper that wrote up the report still claims that the effort to screen the camera operators has been "a success." Oh really? The anonymous tipster also notes that the newspaper in which that article appeared just happens to have donated over $200,000 to the surveillance program while also giving the program a $2 million interest-free loan (and you thought all newspapers were broke), so perhaps it isn't the best judge of how well the program is going.

Filed Under: lancaster, pennsylvania, stalking, surveillance

Town Outsources Video Camera Surveillance To Resident Volunteers?

from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept

Talk about a bad idea in action. We've seen plenty of stories about the growing "surveillance" society that we live in these days -- with cc cameras showing up pretty much everywhere in large cities. But who watches the cameras? Well, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, apparently the answer is anyone who volunteers to do so. First, the city decided to install a ton of cameras -- more than either San Francisco or Boston, despite a massive difference in size. Then, recognizing how difficult it is to monitor everything, the city turned over the managing of the cameras to a private entity who is employing an army of volunteers to not just watch, but control the cameras, and having them "report" any suspicious activities. The article notes that studies have shown such cameras may be limited in their effectiveness (there's no evidence of a decrease in violent crime from them, but some evidence of a decrease in "property" crime).

Still what's really bizarre is allowing unpaid volunteers to man the cameras -- with even the officials from the city admitting that training for the camera operators has been "informal," but that they try to "weed out voyeurs and anyone who might use the tapes for blackmail or other illegal activity." Well, phew. Doesn't that make you feel more comfortable? And then there's this lovely quote from a local business owner who likes the program: "There's nothing wrong with instilling fear." Er... actually, there are lots of things wrong with it...

This actually reminds me a bit of Jay Walker's (of Priceline fame) old idea of allowing individuals at home to monitor secure locations via video streams to their desktop. The idea there was quite a bit different though. It wasn't to watch over people wandering around a downtown area, but to put the cameras on secure areas where no one should ever be -- and the idea was that multiple people would all have the same boring screens up at the same time, and if suddenly someone did show up, hopefully people would notice it and hit the "someone's there" button, to alert security. That idea didn't go very far, but at least it was limited to areas where there weren't any privacy issues. The Lancaster plan, on the other hand, is just scary.

Filed Under: crowdsourcing, lancaster, surveillance, volunteers