Over the winter, I spent a week and a half riding around with the police in the great city of Chicago. 2,250 spy cameras, 466,000 pieces of evidence, four suspected drug dealers, and one giant car chase later, the report I filed for Wired magazine on my trip is finally out. Here’s how it starts.
On a warm afternoon on Chicago’s West Side, a young African-American man leans against the wall of the One Stop Food and Liquor store at the corner of Chicago Avenue and Homan Street. His puffy black jacket is so oversize that the collar hangs halfway down his back. Thirty feet up, a camera mounted on a telephone pole swivels toward him.
Three miles away, in a bunkerlike, red granite building near Greektown, Ron Huberman watches the young man on a PC screen. “You see that guy?” asks Huberman, the 33-year-old chief of Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications. “He’s pitching dope — you can tell. Fucker.“
The corner of Chicago and Homan used to be a haven for dealers slinging heroin and rock cocaine, the heart of a gangbanger free-fire zone. In 2003, the Windy City had 598 homicides, making it the country’s murder capital. Three of the killings happened within a couple-block radius from here.
“We’ve gotta figure out where’s he keeping the goods,” says Huberman, his voice breaking from a bout with the flu. “We’re gonna go on the air” — call for a police car — “and bust him.“
With a move of his mouse, Huberman pans to the right. We’re looking down at a second man, in a beige coat. He has a brown paper bag in one hand and a wad of cash in the other. “He’s involved,” Huberman says, staring hard at the screen. No cop, even undercover, could ever get this close for this long. But the cameras — housed in checkerboard-patterned, 2-foot-tall boxes the police here call pods — can zoom in so tight I can see the wisps of a mustache. Huberman decides not to have his suspected dealers picked up; too much of an Enemy of the State move to pull with a reporter around, perhaps. But the footage will be stored for review by antinarcotics teams. “Now you see the power of what we’re doing?” Huberman asks, still staring at the screen.
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Sounds a bit like a Ray Bradbury plot. But, if people are stupid or bold enough to commit crimes in public, they deserve to be caught.
Perhaps there are a few good reasons we haven’t already gone to video surveillance on a large scale.
First, while the thought of a security force at their disposal while in public can be reassuring, a fair amount of people feel uncomfortable being monitored. Video surveillance can be permitted in PUBLIC areas, as long as the police don’t get roped into a video security force for businesses, too.
Second, measures need taken to ensure video editing can’t be used to frame individuals that go against the tide of people in powerful positions. Hopefully, this situatation won’t arise.
Third, our police force needs the exercise and the public relations to meet all our needs. Personal relations keep a good repretoire w/ the public, which is healthy for all involved — emotionally, as well as physically.
Just remember, if U don’t do anything wrong, U should have nothing to worry about.
Welcome to George Orwell’s “1984”, where Big Brother is always watching.
well i live on the westside wilcox and kildare and it needs to be cameras along this street because it’s so much bs happening that the police can’t get to te crime scene in time. my brother was gunned down right across the street from my aunts home and he’s not a drug dealer.something needs to be gone about these kind of hatred.
These cameras are only useful for getting dope-spots off of major intersections and onto sidestreets. If they put a camera on every sidestreet throught the whole westside, there’ll still be places to buy dope and all the crime that accompanies it.