Baltimore plans hearing over police surveillance plane

“The only people that should be concerned in the City of Baltimore are criminals”, Smith said.

Bloomberg Businessweek said the surveillance has been conducted since January by a camera-equipped Cessna that circles the city recording what is going on below. Officers were alerted to their locations to make arrests, and some of these people now await trial.

The Baltimore flights – with the ability to capture and store hours of imagery covering a swath of 32 square miles – were reported Tuesday by BloombergBusinessweek. “Now just think what that type of evidence-based policing would mean for our crime closure rates”, Davis said. We just can’t read a brochure that a vendor puts together and then go running to the board of estimates asking to spend a million dollars on a technology that we haven’t tested so we wanted to try it, we wanted to prove whether it worked or not and we intended all along to have this conversation with the community but we wanted to get further along in our development, further along in our research before we could stand up here with a straight face and say hey, Baltimore, this is the next best thing on top of CC-TV.

Police spokesman T.J. Smith said the department “understands the anxieties citizens might have”, but he repeatedly dismissed the criticism. “This will target us, and you didn’t even come to us before hand to see how we’d feel about it”, Puce told Bloomberg. “It’s not a secret spy program”. This is not a drone. “This is a 21st century investigative tool used to assist in solving crimes”. “Have they crossed the line?” But he took issue that it was kept secret.

Residents of Baltimore should be equally outraged that this has happened without their consent or knowledge, though perhaps the city’s long history of intrusive surveillance and abusive policing has numbed the response-being observed from the sky certainly beats getting kicked in the chest (literally), right?

As Schwartz derided the workaround as a “semi-public, semi-private slush fund”, the foundation promised in a statement Friday to “increase scrutiny of this type of payment”.

The Baltimore Sun reports (http://bsun.md/2bp2W2Z ) that council members will ask the department why it didn’t disclose its use of a private company to fly the plane and collect the images.

The American Civil Liberties Union, however, said “it’s the equivalent of requiring each of us to wear a Global Positioning System tracker whenever we leave our homes”. The state Office of the Public Defender said it is “outraged”, and said the program is “akin to Global Positioning System monitoring of every citizen”.

Persistent Surveillance Systems has been struggling to persuade a major USA city to formally adopt its technology.

Ross McNutt, founder of Persistent Surveillance, tells Bloomberg that he believes the aerial surveillance can help police departments reduce crime by as much as 20 percent, though he also admits that he has no actual data to support that claim.

At Wednesday’s press conference Smith said Baltimore police “aren’t surveilling or tracking anyone”.

PSS technology works like the hood-mounted cameras of an automated license plate reader – the footage is archived, and in addition to the live stream, detectives working cases can “rewind” to footage days or weeks in the past to track the movements of people they suspect of committing crimes like assault, burglary and murder.

Since desperate times call for desperate measures, Smith said the department “is constantly evaluating ways to stop people from dying in Baltimore”.