Things To Come: 24/7 Surveillance

When Battlefield Surveillance Comes to Your Town

By 

Christopher Mims

Over a period of three months in 2016, a small aircraft circled above the same parts of West Baltimore that so recently drew the ire of President Trump. Operated by a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, the plane was equipped with 12 cameras which, at 8,000 feet, could take in 32 square miles of city in minute detail.

This system is an update of one originally designed for the Air Force, which was used in Iraq to provide aerial intelligence to Marines as they rolled into Fallujah, says Ross McNutt, founder and president of Persistent Surveillance Systems. Only this time, it was being used to catch criminals in the U.S.

Across 300 hours of flight time, the system captured 23 shootings, five of them fatal. In some instances, detective could use this 192-megapixel gods’-eye view to trace suspects to their getaway cars, then rewind to points when those cars had passed in front of one of the city’s 744 closed-circuit cameras.

Mr. McNutt argues that this system could reduce crime in Baltimore by up to 30%. There’s no research to back up that claim, only a 2017 review by the National Police Foundationrecommending further study.

Persistent Surveillance Systems’ trial in Baltimore was only disclosed to the public two weeks after its initial phase was completed, which led to an uproar and backlash. Now, some activists and community leaders want it to come back—after all, as of 2017, Baltimore has the highest per-capita murder rate for a large city in the U.S.

Scholars say that aerial surveillance by police and private firms alike is legal in some circumstances but not in others—and that this area of law remains unresolved. In this case all that would be needed, Mr. McNutt says, would be the blessing of the city’s mayor, Bernard Young. But the mayor is not interested in pursuing this technology, says a spokesman for his office.

Other mayors may soon have to make similar decisions. This technology, broadly known as wide-area surveillance, addresses the problem of police not being able to get to where they’re needed when they’re needed. It’s rapidly falling in price, and finding a variety of new applications.

So far, local law enforcement has been wary of the potential political blowback of using drones for persistent surveillance, but drones aren’t strictly necessary. Many of our cities are blanketed by surveillance cameras monitoring a specific area—New York City has more than 8,000 of them. Most wide-area surveillance tech fits somewhere between CCTV cameras and all-seeing eyes in the sky.

With enough cameras, these systems could produce explorable, three-dimensional maps, where analysts could follow persons of interest as if a drone were hovering over them at all times, says Arthur Holland Michel, founder of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College and author of “Eyes in the Sky,” a book about this technology. The question is, will privacy-minded citizens accept it?