New York City’s High-Tech Approach to Combat Street Crime

This month police in Brooklyn have taken crime fighting one step closer to the Big Brother idea proposed in George Orwell’s science fiction classis "1984." In the first phase of a planned city-wide program, wireless video cameras were installed on lamp posts along Brooklyn streets, about 30 feet above the sidewalk.

The cameras are the first installment in a program to place 500 cameras throughout the city at a cost of $9 million. Hundreds more cameras will be installed later if the city receives the $81.5 million in federal grants it has requested in an effort to encircle Lower Manhattan and parts of midtown with a "ring of steel" for surveillance, modeled after a similar security system in London’s financial district. The city already has about 1,000 cameras in the subway system, with over 2,000 more scheduled to be installed by 2008. Over 3,000 cameras already monitor housing projects throughout the city.

The New York Police Department considers itself to be at the forefront of counterterrorism efforts since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, so the heightened security seems to be a no-brainer. Officials claim that the money would be well spent to protect the Big Apple, especially in light of the information revealed that said al-Qaida members once cased the New York Stock Exchange and other financial institutions. "We have every reason to believe New York remains in the cross-hairs, so we have to do what it takes to protect the city," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

New York’s approach to security isn’t a new idea, it’s just the latest to be implemented. Chicago has spent approximately $5 million on a 2,000-camera system to monitor the streets of the Windy City. Homeland Security officials in Washington, D.C. will be spending nearly $10 million to install surveillance cameras and sensors on a rail line near the Capitol.

Like most government plans to protect citizens, the installation of the cameras has drawn fire from civil liberties activists and privacy advocates. Critics have said that the NYPD’s camera installation program needs to be studied more and safeguards need to be implemented that will preserve privacy of ordinary citizens and prohibit abuses of the system such as voyeurism and racial profiling. Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that the department "is installing cameras first and asking questions later."

Commissioner Kelly responded to criticism by establishing a panel of four corporate defense lawyers to advise the police department on the legalities of surveillance policies. But he insisted that law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear in terms of privacy, because the cameras will be installed only in public areas. "The police department must be flexible to meet an ever changing threat," Kelly said. "We also have to ensure whatever measures we take are reasonable as the Constitution requires. That's the only way to retain public support and preserve individual freedoms."

Although cameras can’t help prevent crimes, they can help investigators identify suspects after a crime has been committed. The London cameras have had little or no impact on crime rates, and they didn’t keep terrorists from bombing the city’s subway system last year. But they did provide investigators with 80,000 videotapes that helped identify and retrace the steps of the suicide bombers so that other suspects were not successful in a follow-up attack.

Timothy Horner, a specialist with the Kroll security firm and a former captain in the NYPD, said that the security system only makes sense in a city that will forever be considered a target for criminals and terrorists. "It's not a cure-all, and the department is not thinking that way," he said. "But we really want law enforcement to use whatever tools they can to keep us safe."