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Speak out on surveillance cameras Long Beach Press Telegram | June 17 2006 If you're strolling down Pine Avenue in downtown Long Beach soon, someone at the Long Beach Police Department will be watching. Some strollers will see this as an invasion of privacy, but the cameras, which rotate and zoom, will only be aimed at public places. The purpose of the cameras — 17 will be installed by October — is to reduce crime, not infringe on your privacy. Cameras are widely used in other cities — Los Angeles and London come to mind — and have been successful in reducing crime where they're installed. They're relatively inexpensive to operate; in Long Beach they'll cost about $200,000 a year. If a crime occurs, officers will be notified instantly, and the criminal acts will be saved digitally on a hard drive. Long Beach already has red light cameras at high traffic intersections on Long Beach Boulevard and Seventh Street. While there's some debate about whether red light cameras actually reduce accidents, there's no debate about the hard, cruel evidence of those expensive snapshots that come in the mail a few days after you thought you made it scot-free through the intersection. We also have become accustomed to being filmed at banks, supermarkets and liquor stores, and some apartment buildings and public buildings have cameras trained at doors and in parking structures. Face it, you're already a regular on various candid camera shows. Is your loss of privacy worth the potential for scaring off scofflaws, or recording them in the act of committing crimes? ---------------------------------------------------
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