West Palm Beach Wants Surveillance Cameras Everywhere (My Title)

Palm Beach Post ^ | 22 Nov 2005 | ANDREW MARRA

[af_vet_rr]

WEST PALM BEACH — Police are rolling out surveillance cameras downtown and in the city's most violent neighborhoods, the first step in an ambitious plan to make West Palm Beach the most closely monitored city in South Florida.

In the next month, four cameras are expected to be placed along Clematis Street and in troubled neighborhoods on the city's north side. Able to rotate 360 degrees and read a license plate a half-mile away, they will roll 24 hours a day and can be programmed to zoom in at the sound of gunfire.

West Palm Beach police will test the first four cameras for several weeks before deciding whether to purchase them from a Miami security company. In two years, the department's assistant chief says he hopes to have as many as 100 in place.

"If we could put up 100 throughout the city, that would be ideal," Assistant Chief Guillermo Perez said.

The cameras' arrival will put West Palm Beach in the middle of a national debate about the use of police surveillance in public places. The cameras have been hailed as an innovative police tool and condemned as a dangerous infringement on privacy.

[af_vet_rr]

Somebody, please reassure me that we are still in America and not North Korea or Cuba or East Germany of the 1970s and 1980s or the Soviet Union.

Please tell me that 1984 was simply some kind of science-fiction book that never had any chance of happening.

[Doogle]

they will roll 24 hours a day and can be programmed to zoom in at the sound of gunfire.

or the slightest hint of bikini adjustment

Doogle

[af_vet_rr]

That's actually creepier than their official reasons for the cameras..

The sad thing is, all of this money could be spent on more cops to actually walk around the neighborhoods, etc., which would do a lot more to lower crime, but it's much cooler to have video cameras watching everybody (West Palm Beach has been interested in this for a long time - they were working on tracking every vehicle that leaves and enters the city a while back).

[NativeNewYorker]

read a license plate a half-mile away

My BS detector just exploded.

[af_vet_rr]

I don't think they'll be able to read a license plate a half a mile ahead (although I've seen consumer video cameras that dang near can), but they won't need to if the city gets its wish and puts cameras everywhere.

It's surprising how liberal some cities are in the state.

I'm sure they'll get federal funding for this as well.

[DustyMoment]

West Palm Beach Wants Surveillance Cameras Everywhere

Wowsers, sounds like a marxist paradise, if ever there was one.

Of course, coming out of the part of FloriDUH that helped put pregnant/hanging chads into the lexicon, this doesn't surprise me.

[af_vet_rr]

Wowsers, sounds like a marxist paradise, if ever there was one.

Of course, coming out of the part of FloriDUH that helped put pregnant/hanging chads into the lexicon, this doesn't surprise me.

No kidding, check out this prior FR thread:
Florida Town to Use Surveillance Cameras (On Everyone)

MANALAPAN, Fla. April 27 One of the nation's wealthiest towns will soon have cameras and computers running background checks on every car and driver that passes through.

Police Chief Clay Walker said cameras will take infrared photos recording a car's tag number, then software will automatically run the numbers through law enforcement databases. A 911 dispatcher is alerted if the car is stolen or is the subject of a "be on the lookout" warning.

Liberals are loving Florida. This is from an interview with that police chief:
Once the news got out that we were going to be taking pictures and running the results through a database we received a flurry of media inquiries. Most of the media people, Paula Zahn, people from the Today Show, Associated Press, were trying to sensationalize the "Big Brother" aspects, but you know the courts have basically held that you have no expectation of privacy on a public roadway. The only databases that we were going to check were the same databases that the State of Florida makes available to the general public over the Internet right now! It's not telling us who you are, or what kind of history you have, it's not getting into your private situations. We will have digital cameras in conjunction with the PIP's cameras that will be able to take photographs of the drivers if the windows aren't tinted too darkly...

Unfortunately, there's not too many true Conservatives left these days (and at times it seems like it's a dirty word in the GOP).