City Expands Video Surveillance -Private-Sector Cameras Added
CHICAGO (STNG) -- The City Council agreed Wednesday to dramatically expand Chicago’s Big Brother reach — with surveillance cameras on street sweepers and a revolutionary hook-up that adds private-sector cameras to the city’s vast video network.
Businesses, high-rises and even private homes with exterior surveillance cameras could share their video with Chicago’s 911 center to create a panoramic view of disaster scenes, under Mayor Daley’s plan. It authorizes the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications to reach out to private businesses and sign agreements with them.
“New private sector camera feeds will provide first responders and Homeland Security officials with additional points of contact throughout the city that can be viewed during an emergency,” Daley, who was home with the flu, said in a press release.
The public-private internet hook-up will transmit “fully-encrypted video” that cannot be compromised by computer hackers, officials said. It was made possible by software tied to Operation Virtual Shield.
That’s the security grid that linked existing fiber optics into a single network and paved the way for hundreds more surveillance cameras, sophisticated software capable of spotting suspicious behavior and for mass transit cameras to be monitored by the 911 center.
The American Civil Liberties Union has reacted coolly to Chicago’s latest plunge into the world of video surveillance. “You see surveillance cameras on the streets, in schools, in buses. To inter-connect all of those systems with private systems really raises a question.
A city that has such pervasive surveillance sends the message that government is looking at them or has the potential to look at them wherever they are,” said ACLU spokesman Ed Yohnka. Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce President Jerry Roper has called the city’s offer a welcome alternative to the costly plan Daley once embraced to require every licensed Chicago business open more than 12 hours-a-day to install indoor and outdoor cameras.
“It’s voluntary. That’s where the business community believes it should be,” Roper said last week. The sweeper experiment will start slowly to work out the kinks.
Cameras will be installed on six of the city’s 60 sweepers—one for each of the five sanitation districts and one back-up sweeper. Streets and Sanitation drivers will activate their cameras when they approach “large clusters” of vehicles illegally parked in violation of posted signs. Each sweeper will have a pair of cameras — one to capture the image of the “illegally parked vehicle and its surroundings,” the other to take a clear picture of the license plate.
Video evidence will be forwarded to the city’s Revenue Department, then mailed to motorists along with the $50 tickets. In 2006, the city issued 345,206 sweeper tickets.
Also at Wednesday’s Council meeting, aldermen approved a new contract with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union that calls for 4,700 city employees to receive pay raises totaling 16 percent over the five- year period ending on June 30, 2012.
Aldermen also approved a $75 million tax-increment-financing (TIF) subsidy to help bankroll a $1 billion expansion at Rush University Medical Center that’s expected to include a new center for advanced emergency response.
And Daley proposed using $10 million in TIF funds to help develop a 75,000-sq.ft. student center and parking facility at Truman College.
Copyright 2008 STNG Wire, The Chicago Sun-Times. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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