Police shutterbugs producing shudders

Why do futility and infamy seem to so often define Boston law enforcement?

Cartoon characters cause mass panic.

Artwork pinned to a college student's jacket prompts a full-scale airport security alert and lands the young woman in scalding legal trouble.

The FBI there hunts a famous fugitive for decades ... after helping him become famous and a fugitive.

Now comes word in this morning's Globe that the Boston Police Department has fallen in love with surveillance cameras at the exact same time that data collected in camera-crazed London casts serious doubts on whether the accompanying expense and intrusion upon civil liberties are producing a commensurate drop in crime.

London has an astounding 10,000 surveillance cameras strewn across the city, an assemblage of ever-present government eyeballs that has promised much but delivered little, according to one recent assessment.

From The Evening Standard:

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.

But in Boston they have a couple of anecdotal cases of cameras helping to catch killers in the act, so they are pushing full steam ahead with greater use of the devices. And whereas the introduction of the cameras - in Boston's Chinatown section - was done with much public fanfare, the expansion of the program is being done surreptitiously, which has some rankled.

The Boston Globe reports:

(City) Councilor Chuck Turner, whose district includes parts of Roxbury and Dorchester, expressed shock last week after learning that the Police Department is using cameras in parts of Roxbury without notifying residents in the area.

"It was my understanding that they [Boston police] would hold community meetings before doing that, just like they did in Chinatown," Turner said.

It's difficult to imagine a slipperier slope than this one.

Chris Ott, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union, questioned the emphasis on fancy gizmos to replace old-fashioned police work.

"For whatever reason, there is a tendency to look at technical solutions to nontechnical problems," Ott said. "We'd encourage people to ask questions about whether there are simpler methods, perhaps better lighting or more community policing."

Most of all, they should be asking questions about where the lines of acceptable and unacceptable intrusions will be drawn ... and whether or not the cameras produce enough benefit to justify the costs.

• privacy