Area firm at center of furor in Baltimore
Aerial surveillance system rejected by Dayton in 2013.
A Miami Valley company that was denied a 2013 contract to conduct sophisticated aerial surveillance for the Dayton Police Department is at the center of a new controversy for making privately funded flights for the Baltimore Police Department without the knowledge of city council members there or residents.
The Baltimore flights — with the ability to capture and store hours of imagery covering a swath of 32 square miles—were reported Tuesday by Bloomberg Business week. By Wednesday, some in Baltimore were demanding an immediate stop to the flights by Persistent Surveillance Systems until the company’s capabilities, funding and privacy issues are examined.
In a March 2015 special report, this newspaper took an in-depth look at Persistent Surveillance and the technology CEO Ross McNutt calls a “live version of Google Earth” complete with a rewind button. He said the system could curtail crime 20-30 percent a year in a city like Dayton.
Persistent Surveillance Systems moved its operations center from Tech Town in Dayton to Baltimore and began flying over Maryland’s largest city in January to test the system that can help solve crimes, McNutt told this news organization Thursday.
Persistent Surveillance continues to maintain a development center in Beavercreek and main flight operations at the Lewis A. Jackson Regional Airport in Greene County, McNutt said.
T.J. Smith, a Baltimore police spokesman, confirmed the Baltimore program at a Wednesday news conference. Smith characterized the plane-mounted array as one more camera added to the 700 groundbased cameras in Baltimore’s CitiWatch network. McNutt also attended the news conference.
The company will conclude the current phase of testing in about two weeks and Baltimore Police will evaluate the results, McNutt said. While it’s too early to tell if any cases identified during the 300 hours of flight time contracted with the Baltimore department will result in convictions, McNutt said analysts were able to assemble 102 investigation briefs.
“We’ve seen everything from murders, shootings, stabbings, carjackings, assaults, all the way down to illegal dumping,” he said.
Both Smith and McNutt said aerial imagery helped track and ultimately identify a suspect in the shooting of elderly siblings earlier this year.
McNutt blunts privacy concerns by explaining imagery is not at a resolution high enough to allow for direct identification of people — who appear as a single pixel on a screen — but analysts can follow a suspect’s actions to and from reported crimes.
“I can’t tell if it’s a man, woman or child. I can’t tell if they’re dressed. I can’t tell what color they are. I can’t tell if they are straight or gay and I don’t care,” McNutt told this newspaper last year. “All I care is that they were at the scene of a crime and I essentially follow everyone who flees the scene of a crime backwards and forward in time to try to figure out what happened.”
Surveillance technologies that track people and store data on their movements give law enforcement significant new but often unregulated powers, said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Certainly if we’re going to have mass aerial surveillance, we definitely want very strong policies,” Stanley said. “We have to confront this kind of technology and whether we want to let it loose on our cities, potentially changing the nature of what it’s like to be out in public in America.”
McNutt said Persistent Surveillance has a robust privacy policy that stands up to several court decisions.
The city of Dayton rejected a deal with Persistent Surveillance in 2013. McNutt says a small vocal group, including the ACLU, convinced city leaders to walk away.
“As a result we moved on into other cities and other operations,” McNutt said. “It’s a shame. The intent is to move our worldwide operation and demonstration center to a location that we can show the system in operation.”
Funding for the company’s Baltimore flights has also come under scrutiny. By law, taxpayer-funded expenditures of $25,000 or more must pass first through Baltimore’s Board of Estimates. But at least $120,000 went first to the private Baltimore Community Foundation before being transferred to the police department, according to the Baltimore Sun.
Bloomberg reported the donation that put the plane in the air came from Texas-based donors Laura and John Arnold, billionaire philanthropists known for funding hot-button causes like rolling back public pensions and advocating for charter schools.