Blue Light Special
Life in a City Under Surveillance
Photos by Frank Klein
The camera at 23rd Street and Greenmount Avenue
Greenmount and 28th Street
"I think [the camera is] good," Shionta Williams, 13, says. "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I'm not worried about them."
"If they put them here, they should put them everywhere," argues Bonnie, 45. "Why do they have to be here in this neighborhood? What's that about?"
Camera at Pennsylvania and North avenues
"They ain't doing nothing for nobody," says Alexander Ellis, 39. "They're just there to lock black people up for drinking beer."
Camera at Saratoga Street and Park Avenue
View original version By Stephen Janis
Big Brother-is-watching clichés spring to mind, but once you get acquainted with the dizzying details of the Baltimore Police Department’s new citywide system of security cameras, Orwellian anxiety gives way to Kafkaesque stupor.
BPD’s chief of technical services, Kristen Mahoney, says four types of surveillance systems are operating in Baltimore, 178 cameras in all, each system using different technologies and being monitored at different locations. “We have a lot of tools at our disposal,” Mahoney says. “But the cameras are going up faster than we can monitor them.”
Twenty-eight microwave cameras, what Mahoney calls “top-of-the-line high-tech,” have been installed throughout the Inner Harbor and in police helicopters. (Mahoney says the cameras “can identify a car on the Key Bridge from the top of a building in the Inner Harbor.”) Then there are 50 closed-circuit cameras, deployed in May and paid for by a $2 million federal Homeland Security grant, along the Howard Street corridor and monitored in the basement of the Atrium Building on North Howard. The third batch consists of 80 cameras scattered around the Monument, Greenmount, and Park Heights neighborhoods, wireless units that were funded primarily by $2.9 million in “confiscated drug money,” Mahoney says. They are monitored by police officers, retired and non-, and residents at the Southeast and Northwest district police stations. The last and perhaps most visible electronic sentinels are the 20 so-called pod cameras, $20,000 units funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice and affixed with flashing blue beacons. These cameras are not monitored: “Officers can use a football”—a remote monitoring device—“to monitor the pod cameras from a squad car,” Mahoney says. Though, she adds, “we do record everything.”...
:banghead:
