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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."
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.