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While You Were Out - Hollywood Gets Spy Cameras
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4426 Reads
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 While everybody else was reeling around after the election like mugging victims who had been punched in the head, the L.A. City Council quietly authorized LAPD to spy on you with remote-controlled cameras.
The Times reports (ever so briefly) that the council greenlit a plan to light up five cameras on Hollywood Boulevard between Vine and Sycamore by January, using money donated by the Hollywood Entertainment District.
As we pointed out earlier, Eric Garcetti has been pushing this rather intrusive and tactically questionable plan, but still has yet to respond to questions from LAVoice or blogging.la about how he weighed the value of surveillance against the intrusion on privacy ...
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More to the point, I've begun to wonder how such cameras can really improve the effectiveness of LAPD's Hollywood division. There's money to install the cameras ($103,000) and maintain them ($25,000 annually) but no indication as to who is going to man them.
And once they've spotted a drunk pissing on Milton Berle's star, is it up to them, or the watch captain, or the officers on the street to decide whether to pull cops off of a mugging followup or broken-window check or yet another shoplifting call to go make him tuck it back in his pants and drag him off to dry out?
And while they're off collaring some victimless criminal at the behest of business owners, what's happening down in the dark side streets off Fountain and Santa Monica Boulevard, where even rich business owners aren't likely to spend money or even get permission to install spy cameras?
Finally, what are they going to do when the police cadet (or whoever they can afford to pay) monitoring the cameras gossips on some blog that he just saw some prominent celeb canoodling with his mistress, and the department gets sued for violation of rights to privacy, defamation and whatever else his 7-figure-a-year lawyer can dream up?
Sorry, but camera surveillance is a poor idea - it provides imbalanced protection, meanders across the line towards queasy-making Big-Brother turf, and gives LAPD extra distractions they don't need. LAPD cops are overburdened and undermanned as it is. Giving them *more* street intelligence that when they barely have time to sift through what they're getting on the beat is questionable tactics at best.
I'd love to see just one LAPD officer respond here with an explanation as to how this plan could possibly improve protection or across-the-board response time for the Hollywood Division.
(Spotted at ChangeLA)
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Thursday, November 04, 2004 - 09:15 AM
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