New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
That camera is watching you
City has 4,500 eyes on the public
NEW HAVEN — If you’re walking or driving on the streets of New Haven, chances are a camera is watching you.
If you’re doing something illegal, that video recording could be your downfall.
More than 4,500 city-owned video cameras are monitoring streets, schools and other public buildings, and the recordings are stored for up to two weeks. That doesn’t include the privately owned cameras watching shoppers in stores or cars in parking lots. And it doesn’t include Yale University’s cameras, many of which are also aimed at public streets within the campus. A Yale spokeswoman did not respond to a request for the number of cameras Yale has in public spaces by deadline.
More than 4,200 of the city’s cameras are monitoring the schools, watching every doorway, restroom and hall. That’s why a student who set a fire at Wexler-Grant School in December was quickly caught, according to Rick Fontana, the city’s director of emergency operations.
But many are aimed at sidewalks or in public spaces such as the Green (one camera is in the City Hall clock tower). If someone is mugged or
dealing drugs or, in the worst case, committing an act of terrorism, the cameras are likely to record the incident.
“Very similar to the Boston bombing, we’re able to go back … and use those cameras to help us investigate, and if we miss something we can grab another camera that’s in another location,” Fontana said.
While he didn’t want to discuss police investigations (and city police did not respond to several requests for interviews), Fontana did say if “a crime happens in Fair Haven, we’ll go to the Chapel Street bridge and we’ll watch every car that goes on it.”
Besides police and the Office of Emergency Management, cameras are used by the city Department of Transportation, Traffic and Parking to monitor traffic flow, including changing the timing of traffic signals in real time to account for a pedestrian or cyclist in the roadway, according to Doug Hausladen, the department’s director.
The cameras on traffic signals do not photograph cars that run through red lights, however. That is against state law.
In emergency management, “We need them here because we monitor the port,” Fontana said. “We monitor all the waterways that empty into Long Island Sound. If we’re activated here and we need to look at cameras throughout the city, we’re able to do it easily.”
The screens in the Emergency Operations Center, located in the basement of the Kennedy Mitchell Hall of Records, 200 Orange St., can show 12 camera views at once. The system is provided by Milestone XProtect and the cameras have been purchased primarily through grants, especially those to increase school safety, Fontana said.
The cameras can “pan, tilt and zoom” to show a wider area, and they can be controlled from both computers and smartphones. Fontana pulled up a view of the oil tanks on the east side of New Haven Harbor using “our latest and greatest camera.” The camera, which cost $6,000, is located on East Rock, about two miles away from the harbor.
“Literally think about what we’re doing; we’re watching the port from East Rock. … We can read a license plate on it.”
When a Madison man drove his car into the Mill River and died in September 2018, “we monitored that entire operation of recovering that body,” he said.
Being watched
Fontana said the cameras do not violate privacy. “You’re in public view,” he said. “You’re out in the public eye and when you’re in the public eye you can expect there are cameras in operation.”
The cameras are only directed at public areas or in the common areas of public buildings, not into people’s windows, Fontana said.
“The important thing is, knowing these cameras are … in place changes behavior,” he said. “Everybody on the Green knows that that Green is being watched.”
For David McGuire, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, the increasing number of cameras does raise concerns about privacy.
“We are definitely concerned about the proliferation of really the next generation of closed-circuit television,” he said. No longer are the images “the fuzzy 7-Eleven cameras that you see on the news.” Now, the cameras show sharp, clear pictures, can be turned in various directions and can zoom in on a scene.
“They’re able to be controlled from a central location or several locations and in some cases from squad cars themselves,” McGuire said.
He also is concerned about the lack of public input into whether and where cameras should be installed.
“Make the case at a public forum as to why they need these and [the] potential downsides,” he said.
“I would hazard a guess that if you were to map them, there would be a higher concentration of cameras where black and brown people live,” McGuire said. “These cameras, along with other surveillance techniques, are often brought online with the public having no say about the technologies. … There should be audits of these systems to make sure they’re used appropriately.”
Fontana said it is not true in New Haven that cameras are put in nonwhite neighborhoods.
“We have most of our cameras in high-traffic areas,” such as “main corridors, downtown areas where there is a greater presence of infrastructure,” he said. Other areas where cameras are focused include the port, the Sound, Long Wharf and the rivers.
McGuire also questioned the cameras’ value in reducing crime and said that, in the United Kingdom, “cities blanketed with cameras … have not seen any significant drop in crime.” Also, “when they’ve monitored officers who are using cameras from afar … their unchecked bias leads them to follow some people more than others.” Fontana said New Haven officers can view the images but only detectives and supervisors can control the cameras themselves.
McGuire also argued against red-light ticketing cameras. Bills to legalize them, “many times spurred by New Haven legislators,” have come before the General Assembly, he said, but “there are many racial justice, due process and privacy problems entwined with red-light cameras and speed cameras.”
It’s much more effective to have an officer stationed at a dangerous intersection, he said, enabling police to use their judgment. Getting a bill in the mail a month after the violation raises “real due process issues,” McGuire said, complicated by the fact that the owner of the car receives the ticket, who may not necessarily be the driver.
“Police unions were opposed to them,” McGuire said. “A police officer’s judgment on whether [and] how to enforce a traffic violation has a lot of benefits that you can’t get with a camera.”
Management
Certainly, most of what goes on is never watched. “We’re not really watching every view of every camera unless we need to review an incident that might have taken place,” Fontana said.
The cameras also are used for reasons other than watching for misbehavior.
Fontana said they are used for “monitoring water level in the port, monitoring in the West River, Quinnipiac River. We give the Coast Guard the ability to look at these.”
Other than the Board of Alders approving grant applications, placement of the cameras does not have to be given a public hearing, Fontana said.
“It’s all determined by law enforcement, Emergency Management and Transportation, Traffic and Parking,” he said. “We have a collaboration between those three departments.”
The Department of Parks, Recreation and Trees also has some say in use of the cameras, he said.
Hausladen said 350 cameras on traffic signals have taken the place of magnetic loops embedded in the road to determine whether a car is at a stoplight.
“In a traffic system, there are certain sequences in the system,” involving when each light switches on or off. There might be six sequences at one intersection, but “some of these sequences do not trigger unless there’s a car present,” Hausladen said.
Most signals are not equipped to take into account the traffic coming through.
“Most of our signals are dumb,” Hausladen said. But those that have cameras can delay a light when they sense a pedestrian in the crosswalk. A project now out to bid to upgrade the Edgewood Avenue corridor will include new signal lights, Hausladen said.