Downtown security blurs privacy

by Dennis Geisinger

New crime technology has been given glowing marks by Minneapolis officials, but the specter of surveillance cameras on every street corner causes some people to question the conflict between security and privacy.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a public interest research center in Washington, D.C., has taken note of one of the main initiatives of something called “The Minneapolis Downtown Security Collaborative”—at least 30 security surveillance cameras installed in 2003 to keep watch over a 10-block shopping area including Target’s corporate headquarters and Target Center.
The security system, a quarter million dollar gift from the Target corporation, “involves a lack of police video surveillance guidelines, as well as a lack of debate at the community level to ascertain the usefulness of the video surveillance scheme and its impact on freedom of expression and privacy,” says EPIC.

“Target saw the benefit of keeping the downtown entertainment district safer,” said Minneapolis Chief Information Officer Lynn Willenbring in a recent interview. “There’s no presumption of privacy when cameras are focused on public streets,” Willenbring said. As one who has been at the forefront of bringing new security technologies to city services, Willenbring characterized any privacy concerns brought up during the process as “a whisper.”

“We’ve made well over 1,000 arrests in the downtown 1st Precinct as a result of the video surveillance system,” said Deputy Police Chief Rob Allen. “And we’ve seen an about 100 percent prosecution rate from those arrests,” Allen said.

The experience of some other law enforcement efforts is not as
compelling.

The Scripps Howard News Service reports that last year in Britain, “one of the world’s most watched countries, a government study released in February found that the estimated 4.2 million cameras arrayed across that nation have done little to reduce crime in the decade they have been in use. As a result, officials there have decided not to install any more cameras.”

And although a Philadelphia police inspector who studied security cameras for his master’s thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey called them an important tool in investigating and prosecuting crimes, he cautioned that a lack of oversight in their management is troubling.

“Forging ahead with reckless abandon by providing no written direction, no supervision, no training and no regulating legislation creates a recipe for disaster,” wrote Thomas Nestel III in his 2006 research thesis, one of the only in-depth, national studies of the subject to have been done.

A tally made by Scripps last year found that “at least 200 U.S. towns and cities in 37 states now employ video cameras—or are in the process of doing so—to watch sidewalks, parks, schools, buses, buildings and similar community locales.”
In Beijing, China, 260,000 cameras scan the city and thousands more are on the way, say Chinese authorities. Critics point to the Chinese governments propensity for keeping an eye on dissenters, for keeping track of just who and how many are counted at public demonstrations.

A Freedom of Information Act request filed by EPIC, revealed that logs of when and where the surveillance camera installed on a U.S. Park Police helicopter was used to confirm that the main purpose of the camera is to conduct surveillance of public protests. Downlinks from the camera were transmitted to law enforcement agencies, including one instance in which the surveillance feed from a pro-life demonstration was sent to the FBI.

“That’s when they [surveillance cameras] are very valuable,” said Willenbring when asked about surveillance cameras and their use during next year’s hosting of the Republican National Convention.

“The activity of large crowds in the city needs to be monitored,” Willenbring said.
According to Minnesota Senate communications, Sen. Linda Berglin (DFL-Mpls.) secured a $300,000 state grant last year to to expand the city’s video surveillance program, beginning with the neighborhoods with the highest crime rates. The program entails funding infrastructure to connect cameras that are being purchased separately by community groups.

“Residents of the Phillips community discussed the need to address the crime plaguing their neighborhoods,” said the senate report. “The residents said the camera system will allow them to reclaim their community and to extend police presence.”

A collaboration between the city, the Ventura Village Neighborhood Association and neighborhood businesses has purchased and installed 17 cameras through a security company called A+ Systems, according to system engineer Mike Bales. Bales was one of a dozen or more technicians present at an expo held Nov. 16 at the City Hall rotunda that featured the systems and the companies behind the science of Minneapolis’ new wireless communication technologies.
Mike Ries, a sales rep for a California company called ShotSpotter, provided details of another technology being used by the city that does not present the privacy dilemma of surveillance cameras when detecting crime.

“We’ve installed sensors across about four square miles of the 3rd and 4th police precincts,” said Ries. “From 15 to 20 of these per square mile can triangulate a gunshot fired within some twenty feet. The sensors can distinguish gunshots from other loud noises and even determine what kind of gun was used,” Ries said. Signals from shot spotters are beamed to police dispatchers within 12 seconds.

“Since it’s gone in, the system has detected 90 percent of the shots fired that we know about in those precincts,” said Deputy Chief Allen.

According to Sheryl Kabat, executive director of Central neighborhood’s Weed and Seed site, a program promoted by the U.S. Dept. of Justice, the gunfire detection system triggered 69 dispatches in its first six months. The alerts led to three felony arrests, three misdemeanor arrests, two recovered guns and a recovered stolen car.

“It’s working better than we expected,” said Kabat in one of last year’s issues of Weed and Seed’s online magazine, Insite. The publication reports that Minneapolis as a whole has experienced a doubling of shots fired calls in recent years, equating to 10.6 acts per 1,000 residents.

Whatever the implications in the debate of the security vs. privacy issue, one local group, The Minneapolis Surveillance Camera Project, has taken it upon themselves to try and create an accurate inventory of all the surveillance cameras in downtown Minneapolis that record people in public spaces.

“Both sides of the public surveillance camera debate can benefit from access to good, accurate data,” says the group’s website. “Individual citizens might want to use the data to select a less-watched route to and from work. Business owners might want to use the data to lobby the city council to add more cameras in under-represented areas. Whatever use this data eventually finds, we just want to gather and present it,” they say.