A police surveillance camera mounted on a pole rolled in September as a man emptied nine bullets into Deion Morris and five bullets into Channy Myrick, killing them both.
But Assistant State's Attorney Rich Gibson could not simply show the tape to jurors and end his case with a sure victory.
The suspect's face wasn't clear on the grainy image. More troubling was that the video proved that a witness had initially lied to police.
She first told detectives that the shooter was in a car, but bullet casings were scattered on the sidewalk, not in the street. Then, Gibson said, the video showed that "the witness wasn't standing where she said she had been standing."
The video helped detectives get a straight answer from the witness but also gave the defense attorney plenty of ammunition to impeach the woman's story. In the end, her initial description of the shooter generally matched what jurors saw on the tape, and they convicted the suspect on two counts of first-degree murder. He is serving life plus 40 years in prison.
When cameras were first deployed in Baltimore, officials told us they would help convince skeptical juries about a suspect's guilt and deter crime. Rather, the extensive and still expanding surveillance network has evolved into more of a way for police and prosecutors to better locate and question witnesses and suspects and stitch together otherwise disparate clues.
"I've never had a case in which a video was a slam-dunk," Gibson said.
This month, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley released a report on surveillance cameras used by the city of San Francisco and came to the same conclusion. They found that officials oversold the program as an easy way to capture crime on tape, put criminals in prison and deter violent crime.
"We find no evidence of an impact of the Community Safety Cameras on violent crime," the report says. "Violent incidents do not decline in areas near the cameras relative to areas farther away [and] we observe no decline in violence crimes occurring in public places."
Researchers did note a decrease in homicides within 250 feet of the cameras but an increase in killings "in areas far from the cameras" - indicating people simply went out of camera range to kill. The report also concludes, "We find no evidence of any effect of the cameras on drug incidents, or on prostitution, vandalism, and incidences described as suspicious occurrences."
