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Have you been to lunch recently in downtown Wilmington?

A traffic camera sent an image of your car to the Internet as you crossed Northeast Boulevard and East 12th Street.

A worker at Downtown Visions watched on a video monitor as you parked at 11th and Walnut streets.

Security guards at one of the city’s big corporations, using their own network of cameras mounted outside their building, watched you walk up to Rodney Square. So did the Downtown Visions worker.

Stopping for cash at an ATM on Market Street put you on a few more video screens.

Want a magazine? Two dozen cameras hang from the ceiling of the drugstore.

The restaurant owner, or one of his employees, watched you eat lunch.

If you did some shopping, the jewelry merchant and clothing retailer also caught you on camera.

And while you were out: A city vehicle prowling the streets with a special camera snapped a picture of your car and compared your license plate with a database of parking-ticket scofflaws.

Paranoid yet?

The use of surveillance cameras across the country has exploded in the past few years as they’ve gotten smaller, cheaper and easier to use. They’re also more common because more people say they’re willing to trade some anonymity for a stronger feeling of protection.

"You feel like Big Brother’s watching," said Kim Gold, 48, of Wilmington. "I just hope he is. Wilmington is just not as safe as it used to be, so anything they can do to deter crime is great."

Privacy advocates and civil libertarians have always been uneasy about that trade-off.

Now, though, the next wave of video surveillance technology is poised to connect all those electronic eyes into a seamless network and pair it with such advances as facial-recognition software. Police could be more effective at catching criminals, but businesses could also become more efficient at identifying customers, their buying habits and preferences.

"Right now, all those cameras are disparate systems," said Stephen Henderson, who teaches criminal law and procedure at Widener University School of Law. "What happens when all those are put together? That’s the critical question, and it’s beginning to happen."

In Chicago, about two dozen businesses with video surveillance systems on the outside of their buildings now feed their footage directly to the police department, which monitors it along with its own network of street-view cameras.

Downtown Visions, the nonprofit organization that operates Wilmington’s network of surveillance cameras, currently doesn’t take video feeds from businesses or homeowners, said Executive Director Martin Hageman.

But the barrier to such a collaboration is logistical, not legal, he said.

"Without some kind of smart technology that would read what is and isn’t a crime — which hasn’t been invented yet — it would take so many people [to monitor the cameras]," Hageman said. "It doesn’t seem to be practical right now."

Henderson said there are virtually no laws to prevent or oversee such a surveillance network.

Without constraints, there’s a strong potential for abuse, said Christopher Calabrese, counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology and Liberty Program.

"The cameras just follow the pretty girls around," he said.

Protecting your rights

Much of the legal debate over public cameras involves the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits "unreasonable searches" when the subject has an expectation of privacy.

Cameras hidden in bathrooms, locker rooms, homes or other such private places would likely be illegal, said Jason Miller, spokesman for the Delaware Attorney General’s Office.

But walk around in a public place and you can’t expect to remain private.

"The police need not shield their eyes from what everybody else can see," said Henderson of Widener University.

As a practical matter, though, there are a limited number of police officers, so they focus their efforts on people suspected of crimes. Public cameras remove that limitation, especially as they become smaller, cheaper and more widespread, he said.

"Then you have the worst of all possible worlds: You have no resource constraint and no legal constraint," Henderson said. "And that creates the danger of a surveillance society."

The ACLU issued a report in 2003 titled "Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society." It claimed that video cameras, data mining, police checkpoints and mandatory identification cards threaten to put Americans under constant surveillance.

In a follow-up report in 2007, the ACLU said such threats had only intensified.

Henderson said one way to help prevent abuse of video surveillance cameras is to implement "back-end controls": legal constraints on how long the video footage can be kept; under what circumstances it can be accessed; and who has permission to view it.

"That really doesn’t exist in the law right now," he said.

Efforts by the American Bar Association and civil liberties groups to press for such laws have gained little traction in the past decade, Henderson said.

"Until you have some significant abuse, people don’t take notice," he said. "We haven’t really had that yet."

While the Constitution puts some limits on what government agencies can do, laws are especially necessary to limit how businesses use video surveillance footage, Henderson said.

Already, online retailers capture customers’ buying habits and preferences, then use that information to suggest other things to buy. Internet-based e-mail systems use the content of users’ e-mails and documents to target ads to them.

Imagine companies, spurred to make a profit, combining private video surveillance footage with the kind of facial-recognition software that many states already use to detect driver’s- license fraud.

"It’s not paranoid to think that will happen with video surveillance," Henderson said. "If it makes money, that’s what businesses are interested in doing."

Not a proven crime deterrent

Calabrese, of the ACLU, said discussion of what laws are needed is less important than the real problem with cameras deployed in the name of public safety: They don’t reduce crime.

Studies by academic researchers and the British government show that cameras aren’t effective at deterring crime, he said. At best, they sometimes help police catch criminals or simply push crime to another location.

A New York University study released in March showed no significant difference in crime rates between two Manhattan apartment complexes, one with a video surveillance system and one without.

"You’re getting a lot of surveillance, but you’re not getting a lot of security," Calabrese said.

Such objections are unlikely to derail New York City’s plan for a "Ring of Steel" around Lower Manhattan.

Modeled after London’s network of thousands of video surveillance cameras and license-plate readers, New York City’s $90 million plan would identify and monitor every vehicle that enters the 1.7-square-mile district. Cameras would cover every public area. Automatic roadblocks could be deployed remotely from a coordination center.

Police and many Delaware residents said there’s no question the cameras deter crime.

Criminals who see a video camera in a store they’re thinking of robbing will often abandon their plan, said Cpl. Trinidad Navarro, spokesman for the New Castle County Police Department.

Keiko Duncan, who owns Divine Fashions on Orange Street in Wilmington, said she’s willing to sacrifice some of her privacy in the name of safety.

"I’d rather have something that can secure me, something that can penetrate my privacy, than become a victim," Duncan said.

Feeling safer

Downtown Visions began installing cameras in 2000 and now has 25 mounted throughout Wilmington’s 70-block downtown area. Another 37 cameras are deployed in the city’s high-crime neighborhoods, Hageman said.

Cameras operate around the clock, and operators can feed live footage to the police. The digital footage is also stored on a hard drive, then written over after seven days unless police request a copy, he said.

The cameras weren’t obvious to 39-year-old Joanne Smagala of Wilmington until she started looking around recently.

"It makes me feel safer, especially when I’m staying later [at work] at night, waiting for the bus," she said. "If you’re not doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about."

Last weekend, a Wilmington police officer shot and critically wounded a 25-year-old city man who had been tracked on Downtown Visions’ network of surveillance cameras.

Police said the camera operator saw the man, Marckia Wilkerson, brandish a handgun at 24th and Market streets. The operator fed the live video to police monitors, then followed Wilkerson on other cameras as he walked about two blocks to the 2400 block of West St. When an officer caught up to him, Wilkerson pointed a gun at the officer, who shot him in the leg, police said.

Such scenarios are routine, though most don’t end in police gunfire, Hageman said.

Wilmington officials value the cameras so much that they recently directed a portion of their $1.5 million in federal stimulus money to the network, which critics say should have been used to help prevent the layoffs of 17 police officers.

Jimmy Hackett, who owns Leo & Jimmy’s Deli near Eighth and Market streets, sees great value in the camera system, too.

Shortly after the cameras were installed, a woman robbed the deli and made off with about $350, he said. A worker called police, and Downtown Visions tracked the woman from the deli to a nearby parking garage, where police found her hiding under a car.

"Within an hour, they had caught her, and within two hours, I had all my money back," Hackett said.

Hageman said workers are trained on the proper and improper use of the cameras. They aren’t allowed to look into buildings or follow someone down the street unless there’s a good reason, such as a crime, a fire or a medical emergency.

The workers are supervised by former police officers, he said. Also, the video-monitoring room itself is covered by cameras to keep an eye on their activities.

"We have a good system to ensure they’re doing the job properly," Hageman said. "I don’t know how you could do much more."

Workers also are residents of many of the neighborhoods they’re monitoring, so they often know the people they see walking around. Hageman doesn’t see that as a violation of anyone’s privacy.

"Anything that happens on the street, there’s no expectation of privacy," he said. "Your streets would be safer if you could identify every person on the street."

Workers who discuss what they see on the cameras — for example, a neighbor leaving a bar at 1 a.m. with someone else’s spouse — would be fired, he said. So far, no one has been fired for such an offense, he said.

Cheap and easy to use

Ken Min, who manages Sneaker City across the street from Leo & Jimmy’s Deli, has a lukewarm relationship with his surveillance cameras.

Four cameras hang from the ceiling of his store and feed images to a monitor and computer hard drive behind the counter.

"People know they’re there, and crime still happens," Min said.

Min had the system installed when the store opened five years ago, and there are already better, cheaper systems on the market.

That’s why the systems are proliferating among all kinds of business owners and available for a few hundred dollars at all kinds of stores, said Delaware State Police Cpl. Jeff Whitmarsh.

"You can go on a Saturday and pick up a couple of lawn chairs and a surveillance system," Whitmarsh said. "If you can operate a VCR or even an eight-track, you can operate these systems."

The systems are cheap, easy to install and often wireless. Some, like Sneaker City’s, allow users to monitor the video from an off-site computer.

"We’ve had cases where we’ve gotten phone calls from businesses saying, ‘My business is being burglarized right now and I’m watching it from home,’ " Whitmarsh said.

Large stores have extensive surveillance systems that can provide police with video clips of a shoplifter stuffing an item into his pocket, walking out the door, getting into his car and driving away, with enough clarity to read his license plate.

Some of the footage that investigators collect is sent to the Delaware Information Analysis Center, or DIAC, a so-called "fusion center" overseen by the state police. The center, inside a nondescript building near Dover, collects and analyzes information from police departments, state agencies and private businesses. Analysts then send that information back out to law-enforcement agencies.

Whitmarsh said police are sensitive to citizens’ privacy and civil liberties, so they collect only what they need for their investigations.

For people such as 29-year-old Waikeem Clemmons, of Wilmington, the cameras just aren’t that big of a concern, even if a government agency wants to expand their use.

"They don’t creep me out," Clemmons said. "You shouldn’t be having sex, scratching your butt or picking your nose in public anyway."

Dexter Patterson, 22, of Wilmington, agreed. "The government has better things to do than watching me walk down the street," he said.

Min, the Sneaker City manager, isn’t so nonchalant. He’s not sure if, given the opportunity, he’d feed his surveillance video to Downtown Visions or the police.

"Yeah, I’d like to have them watching if something bad happens," he said, "but would I really want someone watching me all the time?"

The News Journal | MIKE CHALMERS | Sunday, June 7, 2009