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Baltimore Police Took 1 Million Surveillance Photos of City (go.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the eye-in-the-sky dept.

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."

5 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Good work guys! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Good work guys! by dbIII · · Score: 4, Insightful

      When your metric of success is arrest numbers and not reduction in crime a deterrent does not matter.
      Personally I think the thousands of separate police forces run by local governments across the USA just do not individually have the scale to be run like the best of professional law enforcement elsewhere.

    2. Re:Good work guys! by Falos · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's bad if a PD uses that as their metric of success - it's really bad if someone else tells them that. They're going to be gaming the system as instructed. You're going to get a plateful of gimmicks handed back to you.

      Same as telling schools/teachers their funding depends on grades. Same as telling a wage slave that Metric XYZ is gospel in your house. Same as every oversimplified impetus.

    3. Re:Good work guys! by reboot246 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I certainly don't want one huge national police force at the beck and call of one strong corrupt centralized government. We've seen that in other countries and it usually doesn't go so well for the people.

  2. Old school vs. Technology by geekmux · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.