WASHINGTON - May 27, 2008 – Experts say the District’s plan to centralize 5,600 security cameras creates the potential for privacy abuses such as those occurring in New York and London, where bored officers have become Peeping Toms and citizens have been subjected to embarrassing eavesdropping.

George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen, author of The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age, spent a week in England inside the surveillance rooms watching the watchers.

“What do you suppose a bunch of bored unsupervised guys do at midnight? Zooming in on pretty women and leering at teenagers making out in the park,” Rosen said. “They treated it like a video game.”

They also focused on dark-skinned youths, said Rosen. That is a pattern that has been documented elsewhere.

• In New York City, police in a helicopter supposedly monitoring protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention turned their lens on a couple having sex on a rooftop, following the woman out of the apartment.
• A police videotape capturing a suicide in a Bronx housing project ended up on a pornographic Web site.
• In London last year, two officers took closed-circuit television pictures of nudists and tried to sell them.

The D.C. Office of Police Complaints is expecting similar complaints when the city’s system is totally online later this year, said executive director Philip K. Eure. “With the city’s plans to Londonize its use of cameras, I think there will be complaints in the future.”

Earlier this month, Scotland Yard’s senior police officer called Britain’s huge investment into CCTV technology an “utter fiasco.” The cameras failed to curb violent crime and were used to solve only 3 percent of London’s street robberies. Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said “no thought” had gone into how to use them.

That complaint is echoed in Washington by D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson, D-at large, who said that little planning has gone into the District’s system. Mendelson has scheduled a hearing Friday on the surveillance system.

The D.C. system is expected to cost about $9.6 million, some of which will be paid for by federal grants. CCTV cameras at the public schools, public housing and government buildings will feed into the District’s homeland security department. Three to five employees will monitor the screens during eight-hour shifts. The D.C. police department’s 90-plus cameras will be monitored separately.

D.C. police said violent crime decreased 19 percent near areas that have cameras. But critics said the violence was simply pushed into other neighborhoods.

“The cameras are a feel-good technology; they offer the illusion of safety that’s not backed up by fact,” Rosen said. “It’s unfortunate that D.C. bought into it.”