Aware of it or not, you stroll and drive through Chicago in the web of a virtual dragnet. City of Chicago cameras monitor you and those around you. How many cameras? The official answer? “In the thousands.”
Can you be more precise?
“In … the … thousands,” repeats Tony Ruiz, head of the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications. He is cheerful but intentionally oblique. And wouldn’t you be, if you were responsible for city precautions against every peril short of locust plagues?
Five years ago the city began deploying those surveillance cameras. Other cities (notably London) may have more cameras monitoring public spaces than Chicago does. But Ruiz says no other seamless, collaborative system creates a visual mesh as extensive as Chicago’s — with centrally located city employees able to see every swiveling, zooming, up, down, left and right view.
We’re not sure which is more remarkable, that rapid expansion of surveillance, or the public’s acceptance of it. Citizens occasionally complain to the city that a camera is unsightly — but never that it’s intrusive. To the contrary, Chicagoans have become so demanding that, if a camera comes out of service for repair, Ruiz’s staffers try to replace it with a spare, a loaner. If they don’t, he says, the neighbors (and their alderman) are on the phone: “We want our camera back.”
Whether because of comfort or complacency, some Chicagoans’ early fears of Orwellian spying evidently have dwindled. Similarly, judges here and elsewhere have tended to reject arguments that surveillance violates any constitutional right to privacy. Challenges continue, but the emerging legal tenet essentially is: Because they’re not physically intruding on people, authorities can randomly observe what happens in public places — whether they’re watching from a curb or through a lens. Viewing isn’t searching.
How extensive is Chicago’s visual mesh?
– The Chicago Police Department’s “blue-light” cameras, typically in crime-prone areas, are the most visible. Critics say the cameras merely move crime. But they do disrupt gangbangers’ open-air drug markets. Public complaints about crime tend to plummet within a two-block radius of a CPD camera.
– Chicago’s housing and transportation authorities deploy cameras; a CTA cam helped police document last year’s fatal shooting of Blair Holt, a 16-year-old Julian High School student, as he tried to protect a young friend from gunfire aboard a city bus. Chicago college campuses, too, have growing networks of outdoor cameras.
– Homeland Security cameras overlook unspecified portions of the city, its public spaces and its potential terror targets.
– The Tribune’s John Keilman reported last week that the use of “red-light” cameras is rapidly expanding in Chicago’s suburbs. This as the city expects to make $52.3 million in revenue from scofflaws this year. (During its initial three weeks of operation in 2003, Chicago’s first red-light cam — at 55th Street and Western Avenue — caught 1,114 cars entering the intersection against red lights.)
– Chicago’s network also welcomes feeds from exterior cameras on private buildings. In 2003, images from an exterior cam at the E2 nightclub flatly debunked allegations that police and firefighters responded lackadaisically to a stairwell tragedy in which 21 people were crushed or asphyxiated.
– Interior cameras at private businesses and buildings often capture crime scenes — such as off-duty Police Officer Anthony Abbate’s 2007 pummeling of a female Chicago bartender half his size. But Ruiz says the city network won’t accept feeds from those interior cameras. The privacy considerations there could be just too complex.
This page is wary of any potential threat to individuals’ rights — to move about freely, to be spared unwarranted searches, to enjoy due process in dealings with law officers. But we also applaud modern tactics, and equipment, that keep criminals from freely abusing their victims. Chicago’s system is much closer to the latter than to the former.
Yes, surveillance as extensive as Chicago’s is chilling. It diminishes the freedom, the sense of aloneness in a crowd, that driving or walking in public evoke. That said, it also diminishes the imbalance of power between criminals — armed with their guile, their weapons or both — and the usually vulnerable Chicagoans on whom they prey.
Chicago’s system is open to inspection by visitors at the city’s 911 center on West Madison Street. That transparency can build trust in something as potentially worrisome as a system of cameras “in the thousands.”
Chicago’s five years of experience have established that those cameras can be as effective as they are inhibiting. They’re reliable, unbiased witnesses, capable of checking authority as well as those who wrongly accuse authority of misdeeds.
Criminologists debate why crime has dropped in Chicago and elsewhere. Will any of us be surprised if, years of careful study from now, camera surveillance that encourages our good behavior — and discourages our bad behavior — is judged a crucial factor?
