Report of secret aerial surveillance by Baltimore police prompts questions, outrageKevin Rector and Luke Broadwater
The Baltimore Sun
A private company has been conducting secret aerial surveillance of Baltimore neighborhoods for the police.
The revelation that a private company has been conducting secret aerial surveillance on behalf of the Baltimore Police Department — collecting and storing footage from city neighborhoods in the process — caused confusion, concern and outrage Wednesday among elected officials and civil liberties advocates.
Some demanded an immediate stop to the program pending a full, public accounting of its capabilities and its use in the city to date. Some called it "astounding" in its ability to intrude on individuals' privacy rights, and legally questionable in terms of constitutional law.
Others did not fault the program but said it should have been disclosed.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg Businessweek posted an article outlining an arrangement between the Baltimore Police Department and Persistent Surveillance Systems. The company for months has been testing sophisticated surveillance cameras aboard a small Cessna airplane flying high above the city, according to the article.
T.J. Smith, a police spokesman, confirmed the company has been conducting surveillance in Baltimore but would not immediately provide more information. The police department has scheduled a 3 p.m. news conference to discuss the program.
The arrangement was kept secret in part because it never appeared before the city's spending board, paid for instead through private donations handled by the non-profit Baltimore Community Foundation, according to the article.
The camera system is capable of capturing "an area of roughly 30 square miles," the article said, and continuously transmits "real-time images to analysts on the ground." The analysts can zoom into a certain area where a crime occurred, and then move backward and forward through time to track individual suspects or vehicles in the area around the time the crime occurred, according to the article.
The system has been tested since January, and has already been used to solve crimes and to monitor protesters, according to the article.
Ross McNutt, the founder of the Dayton, Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems, said he would be happy to discuss his company's technology and its value in Baltimore — but not until the police addressed the program publicly.
"We think when people actually see it, they will be happy that Baltimore is doing everything they can to reduce crime and support the community," he said.
He also said the resolution of the cameras is such that individuals are not recognizable, limiting privacy concerns, and that footage is reviewed only in connection with specific crimes.
A spokesman for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who is on vacation, did not respond to a request for comment.
The Baltimore Community Foundation put out a statement saying it merely facilitated the transfer of charitable funds from a private donor to the police department.
Other city officials said the existence of the program was a total surprise to them and raised serious concerns.
"We have to be transparent about it and we have to make sure that we're using it in the right way, especially given all of the things that have come out about the police department," said City Councilman Brandon Scott, vice chair of the public safety committee, who said he first learned about the program through the Bloomberg article.
He was referring to the recent findings of the U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the Baltimore Police Department that found systemic violations of residents' constitutional rights, disproportionate targeting of black residents, unlawful stops and searches and poor tracking of use of force by officers.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment Wednesday on the secret surveillance program or whether the Justice Department knew about it.
Scott said he spoke with Police Commissioner Kevin Davis Wednesday, and that it was his understanding that the surveillance plane is "not used that frequently, and that it is essentially the next evolution of CCTV," a reference to the more than 700 street-level city cameras already in place across the city. Scott said for those reasons, he is interested in learning more about the program and how it could help address crime.
"While I'm angry that I didn't know about it and we did it in secrecy, which is unacceptable especially given everything that we've been going through, I will say that one of the number one complaints I get from citizens is that they want CCTV on their block," he said. "We have to get past the emotion, like I've done, and try to understand it. A lot of black people have asked for CCTV surveillance in their neighborhoods."
David Rocah, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, said "the fact that the city of Baltimore thought that they could adopt it in secret with no public input is beyond astounding."
He said the technology is "virtually equivalent to attaching a GPS tracker to each and every one of us every time we walk out of our house or office building." Any assurance that the resolution of the footage does not allow for individuals to be identified is misleading, he said.
"The fact that you can't use the camera to identify a face is utterly irrelevant to its intrusiveness, because they can match that pixelated dot to a person — whether identified or not — going into and out of particular buildings," he said. "Even without other technology, that simple fact can be used to identify us."
Then, Rocah said, the surveillance footage "can be matched with the more than 700 street-level surveillance cameras that are already installed all over the city of Baltimore, particularly in the poorest and most African-American neighborhoods in the city."
The idea that, according to the Bloomberg article, it has already been used to monitor protesters exercising their constitutional rights and committing no crimes is particularly alarming, Rocah said.
"It gives the government a virtual time machine and it gives it the ability to go back and surveil any one of us at any time," he said. "If that was done in the physical world it would never be tolerated, but the fact that it's being done virtually through technology allows it to be hidden."
Rocah said the police should "immediately discontinue use unless or until the City Council holds hearings on this, and I would hope that the City Council would prohibit the police department from employing this kind of mass surveillance technology."
State Del. Curt Anderson said he didn't have a problem with the police using a surveillance plane, but his colleague Del. Maggie McIntosh said the agency should never have implemented such a plan without getting public input.
"I never like it when any government agency moves ahead with a program without having public input," said McIntosh, like Anderson a Baltimore Democrat. "I have concerns about civil liberties and privacy. If the police are going to move ahead with this, we should stop and do the due diligence that should have been done before any contract was ever initiated. If the concerns can't be addressed, the Baltimore Police Department ought to rethink this."
State Sen. Catherine E. Pugh, the Democratic nominee for mayor, said she wanted to look into the program and learn why it wasn't disclosed to the public previously.
"I need to know more information," Pugh said. "We don't want anyone's rights violated. We don't want anything that harms the relationship between the police and community."
Alan Walden, the Republican nominee for mayor, said the surveillance should have been disclosed but he didn't view the use of such a plane as problematic. He noted there are hundreds of CitiWatch surveillance cameras in Baltimore, an FBI surveillance plane, and constant use of cell phone video cameras by citizens.
"Our privacy has long since been discarded," Walden said. "We are under surveillance at all times. Everyone has a cell phone now. We have drones overhead. There is very little you can do unless you're in a room with a lead ceiling. This doesn't really bother me. It should have been disclosed before the fact. I don't find it threatening in any way. It's another tool the Baltimore Police Department can use to do its job."
Joshua Harris, the Green Party nominee for mayor, called the situation "complicated."
"The public should have been alerted to this in advance," he said. "There should have been more input on this to make sure we don't run into any violations of anyone's civil liberties. The Department of Justice report cited 30 years of violations of constitutional rights. We have to tread lightly. Are we Google-mapping our way to solve crimes? Or are we invading people's individual privacy?"
A few years ago, McNutt had proposed using the technology in his company's hometown of Dayton. Joel Pruce, an assistant professor in human rights studies at the University of Dayton, helped organize opposition to the effort — which was aired at public meetings.
"We met, and we basically asked for a meeting with the police and we had a series of discussions with police and the city's lawyers," Pruce said.
He and others were concerned about privacy intrusions, how the city would be using all the data it was collecting, and whether the surveillance techniques would disproportionately impact the black community, he said. The policies to govern the program that the city put forward were overly broad, he said, and officials declined to change the policies to address the public's concerns.
At the next City Council meeting, Pruce said, the issue came to a head.
"We filled the chamber. It was very loud, and very one-sided" in opposition to the program, he said. "The city manager withdrew the proposal."
Pruce said McNutt was very clear about his public defeat there.
"I'm just going to go to another city," Pruce remembered McNutt saying.
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