District officials relied on centralized security camera systems already being used in London and Baltimore when building their own. But the regulations restricting D.C.’s evolving program make the city’s centralized camera feeds a benchmark other U.S. cities could follow when developing their own watching systems, a law and policy analyst at the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security wrote recently.
With more than 500,000 cameras, London is deemed to have the largest closed circuit television security camera system in the world. The city’s program is designed to capture “activities that pose a threat,” Aileen Xenakis wrote in her law review article, “Washington and CCTV: It’s 2010, Not Nineteen Eighty-Four.” It would be fruitless if “government employees use [the cameras] to observe a crime and then lose their lead as soon as the activity moves out of the scope of the cameras.”
London, however, does not have to operate under the same civil liberty protections as cities in the United States, so when it comes to a model American cities must look within, Xenakis wrote.
That led D.C. to Baltimore, which has been using cameras to fight crime since 1996. The program expanded rapidly after 2005 when then-Mayor Martin O’Malley invested $5 million to add 500 cameras over five years. The city publicized the location of its cameras as a deterrent and D.C. has followed suit, making a list of all cameras under homeland security’s watch available online.
But Baltimore’s system is smaller than the eye-in-the-sky system employed in London, and so it doesn’t deal with the large-scale viewing capabilities the District is moving toward.
So although, “Baltimore’s and London’s programs heavily influenced Washington, D.C.’s plan for its [camera system] … [D.C.’s program] is a benchmark in CCTV policy making,” Xenakis wrote.
As for the cameras in London, George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen said, “they’re now being used to collect taxes on cars traveling through downtown.”
