City attack urgently needs "Eye of the Sky"
It was the early morning of August 17, 2014, and I was riding my bike through Lafayette Avenue in New York, when I suddenly heard a "bang" sound from the right, and 4 people rushed into the shadows silently. A boy on the street fell to his knees and ended up in the middle of the road. As the sirens drew closer, I realized that I had witnessed a shooting, and that the young man lying on the ground was unable to move. Not far away, the girl with his companion had a face full of disbelief and tears in her eyes. But the attackers had already run away.
Two days later, I approached the police officer in charge of the case to find out what was going on: the boy who was killed, Takun Hart, was 19 years old and in a very bad situation. The officer drew a map of the intersection and asked the suspect in which direction he had fled. I drew a west arrow on the map, pointing to Van Buren Street. I only knew the general direction and could not see the suspect's clothing and appearance. A few days later, officers called to say that Hart was not dead, but the investigation into the case was shelved. The shooting became one of thousands of unresolved violent crimes in New York City each year.
If there were a wide-area surveillance system over the city in the early hours of the day of the crime, the suspect would not have run away easily: in the minutes after the attack, the police could track the direction of their escape in time, and they could also trace the history of the case and collect many important clues. Get as much information as possible through wide-area surveillance technology, greatly increasing the chances of finding an opponent.
In fact, U.S. law enforcement agencies have surveillance aircraft, but they can't monitor multiple accidents at the same time, and they are expensive, with thousands of dollars per hour of operating costs, so they are only used for high-impact cases. NYPD helicopters can reach the scene of the crime as soon as 10 minutes after the police are called. In contrast, wide-area surveillance systems enable all-weather surveillance, and sky perspectives can be effective in dealing with large-scale and complex operations, such as terrorist attacks.
The past and present lives of the "Eye of the Sky" and the "Capital of Crime"
Former U.S. Air Force Colonel Ross McNatt is the biggest enabler of bringing wide-area motion imaging into the mainstream. After retiring from the military in 2007, he built a wide-area surveillance system with 8 lenses and founded Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS) to provide wide-area surveillance services to law enforcement agencies.
The project caught the attention of the United States, and in the fall of 2015 McNatt married billionaire John F. Kennedy. D. Arnold signed a cooperation agreement. Arnold has been funding new technologies to fight crime, including a computer-based criminal assessment system called the Public Safety Assessment. He asked McNat to recommend an American city suitable for large-scale deployment of a wide-area surveillance system and to demonstrate the technology's capabilities through system operation. McNatt ended up choosing Baltimore City.
Baltimore City's law enforcement agencies are battling the crime wave and are the most appropriate option for deploying a wide-area surveillance system. The level of bloodshed increased year by year, and by 2015, 60 percent of murders had failed to crack. As a result, the City of Baltimore is more than willing to accept free surveillance services.
In January 2016, PSS's wide-area surveillance aircraft flew over Baltimore City, and the aircraft equipped with a 192-megapixel camera will orbit around the loop between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. The police designed two flight routes, one covering much of the city's western part and the other extending outward from the northeast. As long as the police believe that the crime has occurred somewhere, they can direct the surveillance aircraft to investigate. The wide-area surveillance system generates a frame of 83 square kilometers of photographs per second, and each flight may record a homicide, 3 to 4 attacks, dozens of murders and robberies, and hundreds of drug transactions.
On one occasion, analysts tracked down a suspect in a shooting and found him entering a townhouse that happened to be the spot where police had been called several times in recent times. So the analysts combed through the list of people involved in this series of cases, compared their photos with the suspects in the surveillance video, and finally matched successfully. In this way, a few minutes ago, the suspect was just a fleeting pixel, but now the specific identity and name have been found, and the police have been arrested on the same day.
After months of operation, analysts found suspicious vehicles moving around the city in a coordinated division of labor, reminiscent of the drug lord's usual strategy: Every day, a dozen cars pulled up for two minutes from high speed to a dilapidated convenience store appeared to be linked to a large-scale criminal syndicate that was also identified as linked to a shooting and knife-wielding murder. McNat believed that the convenience store was selling ingredients for heroin and that if the police launched a raid, they would be able to take down at least 15 drug traffickers in one fell swoop, so the police director approved the aerial surveillance operation.
The future of public skepticism, review and legal support
Although Ross McNatt has been opposed to the police department keeping surveillance programs secret, when Bloomberg Businessweek revealed the plan to the public with a story, things went as he expected. When it was learned that the city had been secretly monitored by wide-area surveillance aircraft for nearly nine months, the public reaction was extremely fierce and hostile. Public defenders say widespread surveillance violates citizens' right to privacy, and that secret and concealment are further violations.
During the operation, not a single Baltimore citizen knew they had been locked into a surveillance net that had never been seen over any other U.S. city. Carl Cooper was the suspect in the shooting of an elderly couple, no one told him, and police obtained a warrant for his arrest through a video provided by Eye in the Sky. Kevin Kemp was also unaware that he was accused of committing a series of crimes because analysts tracked him around the city on a motorcycle for nearly two hours.
Two months after the project came to light, the Maryland Legislature Judiciary Committee convened a hearing. Baltimore City Police Department spokesman T.J. Smith made a declaration of defense. "Since January 1 of this year (2016), there have been 255 homicides in baltimore city, and the number of cases has soared by about 62 percent, which requires us to do more in innovative ways to catch criminals at large at a record pace," he said. ”
Wide-area surveillance technology has had a huge impact in this regard, with 21,243 people calling the police in the coverage area during the operation, and the PSS team submitted investigative briefings on 105 cases, including 5 murders, 15 shootings, 3 knife wounds, 16 hit-and-run cases and 1 sexual assault. In the investigation of murders and shootings alone, PSS analysts tracked down 537 targets and identified 73 of them as suspects, helping police advance investigations into at least 10 shootings. In the case of robert McIntosh's murder, the dad of three was shot dead in a park and was just 31 years old when he died, and analysts used aerial surveillance video to help police catch the suspect. The police confessed that without the "Eye of the Sky", the case would probably have no hope of being solved. At the same time, wide-area surveillance projects have a great deterrent effect, with an average of 6 shootings per week in Baltimore, but only 1 in the week the project was exposed. Smith also referred to police concerns about terrorism, "If there is wide-area surveillance technology, when someone commits a terrorist attack, we can go back to the video, carefully identify who did it, and even find the terrorist's lair." ”
Senior lawyer David Rocca questioned: "People's concerns about this technology are not whether it is useful or not, but that the police do not need to apply for a search warrant to search a person's home and do not need a reason to suspect a person." If "useful" is the only criterion for judging wide-area surveillance technology, what is the significance of the U.S. Constitution?
In the face of skepticism, Smith assured that wide-area surveillance technology would never invade personal privacy as the public feared. He showed screenshots of surveillance video that recognized buildings and vehicles but couldn't see faces. As for why aerial surveillance doesn't require a search warrant, Smith elaborated on a loophole in U.S. law that allows U.S. citizens to observe the ground from the air. "The sky is a public space. You can take pictures in public spaces, and the same is true for taking pictures in the air, which is not illegal. A month later, the Baltimore City Police Department issued a Legal Memorandum On The Constitutional Nature of Wide-Area Aerial Surveillance, citing three Supreme Court cases as the basis for U.S. air privacy protection jurisprudence, saying that people photographing public navigation areas does not require a search warrant or break the law.
In January 2017, the Arnold Foundation and PSS invited the Police Foundation to act as an intermediary in judging, and the Police Foundation concluded that continuous surveillance technology has great potential in assisting police in solving crime problems. At the same time, they also defended the Baltimore City Police's advance of the surveillance program before it was widely recognized by the public, arguing that the Baltimore City Police Department showed bold leadership by putting aside personal interests and internal interests of the industry and pushing a long-unpopular project.
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Drones: The Present and Future of the Eye of the Sky
CITIC Press
August 2021
by Arthur Holland Michelle