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Baltimore Police Took 1 Million Surveillance Photos of City (go.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: Baltimore Police on Friday released data showing that a surveillance plane secretly flew over the city roughly 100 times, taking more than 1 million snapshots of the streets below. Police held a news conference where they released logs tracking flights of the plane owned and operated by Persistent Surveillance Systems, which is promoting the aerial technology as a cutting-edge crime-fighting tool. The logs show the plane spent about 314 hours over eight months creating the chronological visual record. The program began in January and was not initially disclosed to Baltimore's mayor, city council or other elected officials. Now that it's public, police say the plane will fly over the city again as a terrorism prevention tool when Fleet Week gets underway on Monday, as well as during the Baltimore Marathon on Oct. 15. The logs show that the plane made flights ranging between one and five hours long in January and February, June, July and August. The flights stopped on Aug. 7, shortly before the program's existence was revealed in an article by Bloomberg Businessweek. "We have a real opportunity to police smarter," Commissioner Kevin Davis said. "The old days of looking at a spike in violence, and marching orders to stop everyone that moves in hoping of identifying a suspect or a witness -- we have to move away from that type of policing. I just believe that taking advantage of this technology opportunity was a prudent thing to do."
just as your USA municipality.
Then you won't mind Big Brother watching you.
For public safety. And freedom.
Yeah bullshit. Mayor's office pushes policies on the police department and drives what they do and how they enforce law. They are exactly the ones that pushed this.
Land of the free. Home of the brave.
Good to see we're still aspiring to the ideal.
So, even if we make the generous assumption that lots and lots of aerial photos are a useful tool, rather than some combination of vendor snake oil and lazy technophiles looking for any excuse to sit in some sort of 'command center' with a comfy chair and some giant monitors instead of having to go outside and do boring police stuff; how is secrecy a good plan?
Solving crimes is nice; but what people really like is when your 'deterrents' cause them to just not happen in the first place. You might be able to justify some concealment of the fine details in order to frustrate attempts to circumvent the measure; but keeping the existence of the entire program secret massively reduces its potential as a deterrent, which is effectively choosing to have more crime in the hopes of closing more cases rather than increasing the perceived risk of engaging in crime.
There are, of course, other reasons for secrecy; but they aren't very flattering.
So taking over a million secret aerial photographs is supposed to stop crime and terrorism?
If another person or organization did this I suppose they could plead that they did this for the good of the community. I'm sure the police would believe them.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
"The old days of looking at a spike in violence, and marching orders to stop everyone that moves in hoping of identifying a suspect or a witness -- we have to move away from that type of policing..."
Ah, so the method of blanketing a particular area for a specific amount of time as a justified response to criminal activity isn't good enough at generating enough arrests, so the answer is to use technology to perform mass surveillance against thousands of innocent people for months, even when there is no justified cause to do so, in order to generate arrests and revenue.
Believe me, you don't have to offer up pathetic excuses about the "old days". We get why the fuck you're really doing this. And not only is it disgusting, it's unconstitutional and should be illegal.
I propose anyone still wanting to claim we have Freedom in the United States be charged with criminal ignorance. It's quite obvious the police state we now live under mandates otherwise.
Have a nice day Baltimore.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
There's a stream link at the top. If you want to save the mp3 for later, open in vlc and find the source url in 'codec info'.
Tl;dr version- This type of surveillance is mind-bogglingly useful in very high-crime areas, but if abused will quickly degrade into the worst 1984 scenario I can imagine.
For now I'm not too worried unless the system scales down to fit easily on a drone or something. Modern aircraft are still at least possible to spot visually or on low-end radar.
314 hrs * 60mins = 18840mins of flight.
1 000 000 photos / 18840 mins of flight = 53 photos for every minute of flight taken.
I heard all about it on Radiolab.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-eye-sky/
Nuke the entire site from orbit--it's the only way to be sure.
found the southern inbred redneck from alabama...
What you said is no less offensive or racist or whatever than what the parent AC said, FYI. You're no better than them.
Who will care if they have a million pictures of someone tossing grenades into a crowd on the street?
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but cops on the street may be worth a thousand lives.
You can't stop/prevent everything, but you may deter a lot, and may put an end to a violent event sooner, limiting casualties.
Sitting back and documenting it all as it unfolds is stupid.
This was covered in RadioLab's recent podcast episode "Eye in the Sky," about Ross McNutt's company Persistent Surveillance Systems, and how the police in Baltimore didn't have to get permission from the city's mayor in order to operate. http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/
Worse actually.
Funny, I don't see a suggestion to bulldoze Alabama there.
For all you know, they may support education and emotional support instead. Quick to judge, aren't you? Just because we recognize the inbred Southern rednecks, doesn't mean we don't want to help them.
They, on the other hand, have stated their desire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QLV1I4J_HU
The city of Baltimore can't afford the GPU time to make those images useful for anything other than an enormous monthly EBS bill.
Nuclear reactors have control rods to interfere with the fission process, electric junctions have circuit breakers to prevent electricity flowing. Even the police thought 'stop and frisk' was a good idea. It's a simple mechanism that seems to affect a lot of physical and social processes.
How many of the surveillance photos led to arrests? When the police are already watching vehicles via plate readers and traffic cameras, what does an expensive airplane add to the data? What makes taking photos via an expensive airplane, 'smarter'?
This is the police attempting push-button crime prevention, almost literally, in this case.
or lead to any arrests for these crimes?
Wow at 25 fps that is 11 hours of video. They were seriously ripped off.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Donut hunt
Requiem for the American Dream
"We have a real opportunity to police smarter," Commissioner Kevin Davis said.
"But", he added, "we'll just keep picking on black people because it's easier".
Eye in the Sky
Another Big Brother tool for China and Russia to use to continue stamping on a human face, forever. No more "imagine" needed.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
> -- there's so many police forces and so many of them are small, use of force training has no chance of being uniform across all departments nor does the quantity and quality of training have a chance of being the same.
The use-of-force training can be exactly the same, taught by the same instructor, with cops from different departments in the same class if you prefer. Each department doesn't have to run their own training school, and shouldn't, for most things.
In Texas there's a place called TEEX - you may have seen part of it, Disaster City, on TV. TEEX trains firefighters and some police from not only all over Texas, but from all over the world. Unlike a department-run academy that runs once per year, TEEX staff is mostly full time, year-round instructors, with topic-specific experts brought in for special classes. Because their facilities are in use year-round, with multiple facilities being used by different classes simultaneously, they can afford better facilities than any one department.
There's another advantage as well. Because TEEX has some of the best facilities and staff in the world, private companies want use it from time to time, for testing fire safety or new equipment for fire fighters, police, and paramedics, and car companies use the driving facilities to test car safety, etc. They pay well. So you end up with the extra money Fire Trucks, Inc helping to offset the cost of training for Podunk County PD.
Lastly, it gives Texas a full-time team of expert first responders ready to go for any emergency. The Search and Rescue team from TEEX is well known nationally, in S&R circles. In many states, the S&R team is regular cops and firefighters who train in S&R a couple of weeks per year. Texas Task Force One train S&R all day, every day. They responded to World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing, and I watched them roll out toward Katrina the day before it made landfall.
So there is that option. You *can* have everyone get the same, very high-quality training from a dedicated training organization, then supplement with classroom or on-the-job training specific to a particular department. The urban and suburban departments can add their own along with the consistent training. Also, the training center (TEEX etc) offers more than one class. A rural department can choose a TEEX class that covers dealing with wild animals or grass fires, while an urban department chooses an extra class on de-escalating situations, crowd control, or high-rise fires. Both would probably get the same use-of-force classes.
Short of deploying the MD National Guard, there is no policing that will have any effect some of these war-torn neighborhoods in Baltimore. Make no mistake -- this is just as bad as South Side Chicago. The gangs absolutely control not only the streets, but the jails too. Witnesses are ruthlessly threatened, and any cooperation with police results in violent reprisal. The stop snitching culture rules all. Most kids have no fathers present and the idea of education itself is ridiculed. The gang banger MO now is to walk up to someone in broad daylight and unload the high capacity magazine of your large-caliber handgun into your victim's head (yeah, despite some of the most rigorous gun laws in the nation including a ban on such magazines). After a hot weekend in the summer, you often end up with a body count inline with Falluja or Aleppo, Because no one cooperates, often camera footage is the only evidence available to help catch these thugs. Unless forces from outside the city decide to stop this cycle of violence by a) ending the "war on drugs" and b) truly deciding that "Black Lives Matter," therefore gangs destroying black neighborhoods are incompatible with civilization itself, then absolutely nothing will change, ever. Though the surveillance program should have been disclosed, I cannot fault the city for thinking outside of the box and trying to gain some sort of assistance in combating this horrific violence. Please take a look at this article from the Baltimore Sun published this AM to get some perspective on *why* stuff like this is even considered.
Remember this the next time you hear a story about the street photographer who gets stopped and harassed by the local police for taking pictures of the wrong building or, god forbid, someone taking pictures of COPS in the act of doing something stupid.
Seems Law Enforcement loves the ability to keep you under surveillance at all times. Themselves not included, of course.
"The old days of looking at a spike in violence, and marching orders to stop everyone that moves in hoping of identifying a suspect or a witness"
So they're suggesting the choices are that they harass a bunch of people or the public allows them to surveil the entire city likely at a cost of millions of dollars per year? I assume their next "option" is going to be they get legal authorization to "randomly" search homes without a warrant or they'll send groups officers to areas with a crime and try to lie their way into "voluntary" home searches and those who don't allow the searches will be harassed or their lack of cooperation will be used as "evidence" that they're doing something illegal. A better option than any of these might be to encourage the community to cooperate/assist police via reasonable, accountable and respectful police behavior instead of threats, intimidation, harassment & a complete lack of accountability.
Were they all on color glossy 8x10s with circles and arrows pointing to the scene of the crime?
Some might be curious about the system, the company who deploys it, and exactly how it works and how they coordinate with local law enforcement: https://www.bloomberg.com/feat...
Radio Lab should get the credit for exposing this.
Alabama is beautiful! Come to Mobile, and you'll find it, comparatively, like New Orleans. Mardi Gras was started here.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Wow! What an operation to look up women's skirts! And payed for my Federal Government money from the Treasury.
"Never before has duct-tape and a mirror gone so far."
Ha ha
Tax payers can float the bill. And when nothing changes but the size of the execs pockets, we will be right back to where we are now.
1 million images taken resulting is zero crimes prevented. Your hard earned tax dollars at work AND welcome to the new police state people.Get the hell out of the planes and get out of your cars and start preventing crimes. cops are not helping prevent crimes because they are being over paid METER MAIDS more interested in giving tickets.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say. Perhaps you could clarify. You mentioned "tax payers can float the bill", so I'll give you a bit of information about that.
With the TEEX model, about 10% of the TEEX budget comes from the state of Texas - from Texas taxpayers, but actually about zero percent because TEEX sends money back to the state at the end of the year. A large percentage of funding comes from training first responders from other countries; Mexico and Canada spend a lot at TEEX having their first responders trained, as do many of the oil producing countries because TEEX has mockups of oil rigs, pipelines, etc that are rigged to catch fire, collapse, etc. Other states such as California send their people to TEEX for training. Other get a good deal, but provides some revenue. The best deal for taxpayers is private companies who get the training or use rent the facilities - Chevron etc have their own firefighters and other emergency workers on staff who train at TEEX, plus there's product testing.
Texas taxpayers get Texas Task Force 1 and other benefits of having the training center more or less for free. Btw you can also get free TEEX training online. Their cybersecurity courses are pretty decent.
It's 1 frame per second with enough resolution to watch a 25 square mile area and follow a car as it drives away from a crime scene, as well as rewind to see where the car came from. When a crime occurs, you can rewind to see the bad guy drive up, then watch to see where they go. I want one! :)
PS the company decided that they will not build a system with resolution better than enough to follow a car, which will be about six pixels or so.They won't build something that can see a face. Of course another company might.
Along with crime/security for something like the Super Bowl, they can assist with wide-area real time views of natural disasters, they've done traffic flow analysis to watch traffic jams form in real time, etc.
What? Did people think surveillance drones were just for countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen? Those countries were just the demo/proof of concept. As much money as we spend on the military and its equipment, state and local police departments are a far bigger market with plenty of access to our tax payer dollars. Drone manufacturers know this and could care less about our constitutional rights.