Attention, pedestrians and drivers in downtown Baltimore's west side: Be on your best behavior. Someone is watching.
And recording.
The city is set to launch today a $2 million network of surveillance cameras to constantly monitor and digitally record the street-level activities of a 40-square-block area.
A group of civilian monitors will staff the round-the-clock operation - 43 cameras to start - from the basement of The Atrium apartment building at 118 N. Howard Street, where they, too, will be under recorded camera surveillance.
The City Watch Center at The Atrium will make its official debut at a public ceremony Friday. But the $600,000 annual operation that privacy rights groups oppose will begin watching - and taping - at 6 a.m. today.
"I can't tell you how many officers it would take to cover this much land," said Kristen Mahoney, chief of technical services for the Baltimore Police Department. "We're putting more eyes on the streets."
Baltimore's closed-circuit camera network is, after Chicago's, one of the most extensive in the nation. Its construction was funded by a federal grant and is part of a regional homeland security initiative planned to span five counties. In the event of a terrorist incident or disaster, the network will help to coordinate responses; day to day, it will be used to deter crime.
Baltimore currently has nearly a dozen powerful cameras practically ringing the Inner Harbor and parts of the port that are monitored at Police Department headquarters. The city is also building a $2.9 million network of 80 cameras in three high-crime neighborhoods that will be monitored in police districts and paid for mostly by funds seized from drug dealers. In addition, this month the city will announce it is buying portable cameras that police can monitor from cruisers.
And Mayor Martin O'Malley wants to spend $4 million of his current budget surplus on more cameras for the high-crime neighborhoods initiative.
"The purpose of the cameras are the same purpose we have officers on the street - to make public areas safe," O'Malley said. "The fact that [the cameras] have a peacetime purpose as well as a purpose in this new kind of war is a positive thing."
Although studies of cameras in the United Kingdom and in U.S. cities question their crime-fighting effectiveness, city officials and several neighborhood leaders believe they are effective deterrents.
