Police: Cameras a crimefighter; critics worry of over-policing
Police have used cruiser-mounted cameras for years to help identify passing motorists whose license plates show up in crime databases — a way to snare wanted felons, fleeing criminals or stolen vehicles.
More recently, a new sort of camera does basically the
same thing, but it’s mounted at the entry ways to communities, acting as a kind of quiet sentry. And it isn’t always used by police.
A leading vendor of the equipment is Atlanta-based Flock Safety, with equipment now used in about 1,400 cites in more than 40 U.S. states.
Flock says it has 16 contracts in Greater Columbus, six of
them with law enforcement. One of the latest is Genoa Township in Delaware County. The township said it will install three cameras at its southern entrances this month.
From every passing vehicle, the cameras will capture state license plate numbers; vehicle descriptions, including make and model; and details about bumper stickers or decals and whether it has a roof rack. The data, combined with artificial intelligence programming, then can be used to investigate crime.
“If officers learn from a doorbell image or witness that a crime was committed between 2 and 4 a.m. by someone driving a white Honda, they can search the database to see which white Hondas entered the township around those hours,”a township news release says.
The cameras also are connected to national crime databases and will alert officers within seconds of wanted felons, missing people or sex offenders passing through an entry point.
Privacy advocates and critics of ever-increasing uses of surveillance cameras, however, worry that “mission creep” will expand their use by law enforcement — and possible misuse.
From red-light and traffic cameras to license plate readers and drones, “there’s been a continual increase in the availability and effectiveness of this technology,” said Gary Daniels, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, based in Columbus. “We are gradually getting to the point of big cities going to 24/7 surveillance.”
Holly Beilin, a Flock spokeswoman, acknowledged the concerns and pointed to features the company has installed that it calls “ethical guardrails.”
Some of those features include: data is automatically
purged after one month, and users are required to give a brief reason for using the data each time they access it.
For police, that means entering an incident report number for crimes such as burglary or hit-and-run in order to justify data access. Law enforcement agencies
already using the technology say it has helped solve and prevent crime.
In Upper Arlington, which has 11 of the cameras, patrol officers received an alert in September for a woman wanted for murder in West Virginia. She had been passing through the city with her boyfriend when her license plate triggered a citywide alert,
police Lt. Jason Messer said. “We stopped the car and detained them,” he said. “We were able to identify her vehicle within a minute.” Messer said he’s pleased with the results — about 20 felony arrests since April 2021 — mostly for property crimes.