April 11, 2008

Washington, D.C., Police to Connect 5,000 Surveillance Cameras

D.C. officials are giving police access to more than 5,000 closed-circuit TV cameras citywide that monitor traffic, schools and public housing — a move that will give the District one of the largest surveillance networks in the country. "The primary benefit of what we're doing is for public health and safety," said Darrell Darnell, director of the city's Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. But camera opponents counter that the devices are not an effective crime deterrent and can result in an intrusion on citizens' privacy. "When you look at [police] statistics, the first thing you noticed was that they don't account for displacement, where you put a camera up on one street and the drug dealer goes to the next street," said Melissa Ngo, senior counsel and director of the Identification and Surveillance Project at the District-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. "That is not cutting down on crime so much as moving it."

D.C. police set to monitor 5,000 cameras, Washington Times, April 9, 2008.