After reading this story in the Baltimore Sun I'm humming to myself the song "Electric Eye", a 1982 release by the metal group Judas Priest. That wasn't too far from 1984 and neither is this.
The quote I found most amazing was that "(c)ity officials argue that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy on a public street. The cameras, they say, do not see anything more than a police officer could see." That is, if a police officer can follow a car or a person unnoticed anywhere within a 40 square block area of West Baltimore.
And it's certainly not that I'm soft on crime. If a person wants to ring his private property with surveillance cameras and have someone watch every move made on what is theirs, hey, more power to them. And I would expect such things at banks or in stores as a shoplifting deterrent. While there is possibly a use for this as a crime deterrent (it's noted in the story that studies are mixed on the effectiveness of cameras as a tool), there's also the fact that it is an invasion of my privacy to have Big Brother following me down the street. And actually, if I'm walking or driving down the street minding my own business, I DO have an expectation of privacy.
Besides, much like the cameras that catch you at red lights, these cameras are only successful after the fact. Where Baltimore officials see this as an extension of the police, this only can be useful after the fact. If they reduce police presence on the street because X number of cameras cover the area, that doesn't help the poor soul who gets his brains blown out in a street robbery. You may get a nice picture of the perp but if the people who are supposed to be watching miss out, there's a good chance the robber gets away. He could be in Virginia by the time the word gets out to the media.
I also find it interesting that Homeland Security money was used for this. We can't pay for another several thousand Border Patrol agents and actual bodies on the street, which work best for fighting crime and terrorism, but we can hand off a couple million to Baltimore to scope out mostly petty street crimes. I suppose it is the drawback of giving money to the states to see as they do fit with it, sometimes it's spent in a foolish manner.
There was some good news on the Wal-Mart front today, but it's tempered by a late announcement. As I had hoped, Governor Ehrlich vetoed the so-called Fair Share Health Care Act at a public ceremony in Princess Anne today. That community is the seat of Somerset County, one of the most rural Maryland counties and one who's expectant of hundreds of jobs from a proposed Wal-Mart distribution center. (I live just a few miles from the county, it's on the southern border of Wicomico County where I live.) But the announcement that the opening of this center has been pushed back to 2008 or 2009 put a late damper on the news. (That news actually came on the Sun website as I was writing this. In fact, they changed the headline from being about Ehrlich's veto to the distribution center delay.) While it was not expressed directly, the feeling is that Wal-Mart's going to wait and see about whether this veto is overridden.
So I have some work to do, I'll need to fire up my letter-writing talents and see what other action there is for me to take before we kick a politically incorrect company out of Maryland.
