Baltimore Aerial Surveillance
A surveillance camera is seen on a light post at a street corner in West Baltimore. On Friday, May 1, planes equipped with cameras will begin creating a continuous visual record of the city of Baltimore so that police can see how potential suspects and witnesses moved to and from crime scenes. Police alerted to violent crimes by street-level cameras and gunfire sound detectors will work with analysts to see just where people came and went. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
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By Regina Garcia Cano, AP

Starting Friday, the roughly 600,000 people living in Baltimore will be constantly recorded whenever they step out under the open sky.

Marvin L. Cheatham Sr., for one, knows he could be watched as he goes to a doctor’s appointment or visits friends. He’ll be spied upon in his back yard, and as he steps into his car, and when he drives around the city, his entire trip will be recorded, too.

All his movements will be captured, and he’s OK with this — even though police will have no search warrant, and the overwhelming majority of Baltimore’s citizens will have committed no crimes — because the city is so besieged by violence.

Baltimore Aerial Surveillance
Marvin L. Cheatham Sr., who led his local NAACP chapter in the 1990s, poses in the park he built in West Baltimore following the riots sparked from the 2015 Freddie Gray arrest. Starting Friday, May 1 nearly the entire city of Baltimore will be constantly recorded from the sky. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

“I am so upset and angry about all these people that have died, I’m willing to give up some of my rights, as bad as that sounds, and I’m a staunch civil rights person,” said Cheatham, who led his local NAACP chapter in the 1990s. “I had 19 homicides two years ago in my neighborhood.”

For the next six months, up to three airplanes outfitted with wide-angle cameras will sweep over Baltimore in daytime flights designed to capture movements across about 90 percent of the city. Software will stitch together photos taken once each second, creating a continuous visual record to support the street-level cameras, license plate readers and gunfire sound detectors police already use to try to solve crimes.

Analysts alerted to a crime will be able to zoom in from the city-wide image and move backward and forward in time to identify the movements of potential suspects and witnesses, telling officers within hours just where to look for people who traveled to and from the scene.

Police Commissioner Michael Harrison has promised that this system will only be used to investigate homicides, non-fatal shootings, armed robberies and carjackings. He said he doesn’t know whether the pilot program will be effective.

Baltimore Aerial Surveillance
A scanner is seen near a traffic signal in West Baltimore. On Friday, May 1, planes equipped with cameras will begin creating a continuous visual record of the city of Baltimore so that police can see how potential suspects and witnesses moved to and from crime scenes.  (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

“I have no expectation of what it would do or what it will not do because it has not been done in the United States before,” he told The Associated Press. “What I’ve been shown shows me that it’s a potential tool that could be used by detectives in the crime fight.”

As for concerns about violating the people’s rights across an entire city, Harrison said the Supreme Court has ruled that “there is no expectation of privacy in a public place.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland argues that this continuous aerial surveillance infringes upon reasonable expectations of privacy regarding movement, results in indiscriminate searches without a warrant and impedes the right to gather freely.

It’s the technological equivalent of a police officer following every resident, wherever they go, whenever they leave their home, senior ACLU attorney David Rocah said.

“If that happened in real life, I think everyone would very clearly and viscerally understand the privacy implications, but because this is being done remotely with sophisticated video technology from an airplane, we don’t experience the invasion in the same way,” Rocah said.

federal judge denied the ACLU’s request for a preliminary injunction, saying far more intrusive surveillance has been found constitutional. The plaintiffs are appealing.

Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems will capture the images and provide the analysis to police, funded with roughly $3.7 million from Texas billionaires Laura and John Arnold.

PSS President Ross McNutt initially developed the technology to help the Air Force identify people leaving improvised explosive devices that were killing troops in Iraq. McNutt says that resolution of the images aren’t sharp enough to identify faces, ethnicity, gender and clothing, nor vehicles’ color, make, model and license plate.

Police say they won’t be using this to monitor people outside the context of a serious crime that has already happened. The city’s agreement specifies that PSS analysts will study movements “only when an egregious violent crime is already known to have occurred.”

But the ACLU’s plaintiffs — community activists and political organizers — said simply knowing that their movements are being recorded makes people reluctant to participate in events and protests.

The contractor already secretly tested this surveillance in Baltimore in 2016, as crime soared after the death in police custody of a young black man, Freddie Gray. But that effort was cut short once exposed, and violent crime has flourished since then, along with mistrust of police, and some of Baltimore’s leaders are now publicly committed to testing mass aerial surveillance.

This deeply segregated seaport city has now suffered more than 300 homicides annually for five years straight, setting a per-capita U.S. record with 348 killings in 2019. Eighty-nine people have been killed so far in 2020, just three fewer than last year’s pace. Lesser crimes are down sharply as people shelter inside during the coronavirus pandemic, however, with 177 non-fatal shootings, compared to 212 last year.

Third-party researchers from three universities and the RAND Corp. will evaluate whether the program leads to arrests and case closures, earns public support and ultimately has a deterrent effect.

Andrew Ferguson, a law professor who writes on policing using big data, said police chiefs see technology as a solution when they’re backed to the wall by violence in their communities.

“It doesn’t matter what that something is. They just have to respond because ‘Chief what are you doing about crime?’” Ferguson said. “The real answers are ‘Well, I need better schools. I need more jobs. I need some hope and opportunity in these cities, better housing.’ But that’s not available. He doesn’t have that.”

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98 COMMENTS

    • It jumped from England to China. Now the tech has been perfected for the Americans.

      What do you got to hide? If you are not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. It’s not like the government will spy on you to get enough of a reason to no-knock raid your house and shoot you when you fail to comply. Of course the videos of your death won’t be released to the public.

      • “It’s not like the government will spy on you to get enough of a reason to no-knock raid your house and shoot you when you fail to comply.”

        Yeah, you prolly got something there. But I am going to use it to bring in something completely political, not directly about guns.

        Judge Mury of the Michigan Court of Claims ruled that the house arrest protesters in Michigan sued the state for violation of fundamental rights, but….
        “…those liberty interests are, and always have been, subject to society’s interests – society being our fellow residents,” the judge wrote. “They – our fellow residents – have an interest to remain unharmed by a highly communicable and cdeadly virus, and since the state entered the Union in 1837, it has had the broad power to act for the public health of the entire state when faced with a public crisis.” ”
        https://www.foxnews.com/politics/michigan-gov-whitmer-wins-court-fight-over-coronavirus-stay-home-order

        Watch for some of the words to begin appearing often in regards to placing the nation on lockdown due to some alleged public health (or safety) crisis.

    • Kind of a repost of something I posted in response to another here, but relevant…

      Anyone get the feeling lately that Welles treatise on all things Orwellian has been taken as an instruction manual, instead of the dire warning it was meant to be?

      I mean, browser security is blocking 65 items here that make it to my browser, after running a gauntlet of security including a custom built hardware firewall that checks for/& updates every 3 hours, & custom hosts file. Most that get to the browser itself are scripts, frames, 1st & 3rd party tracking cookies. HTML5 canvas fingerprint (a particularly insidious form of tracking/spying) is scanned every time I come to the site, albeit they’re phreaked, and report false values as my browsers response to said queries (falsified values are changed every 60 seconds, so never the same value either). Could block them, but until that’s ubiquitous, it’s easier to track currently, a few more iterations of Firefox with the HTML5 blocking are needed before you’ll be lost in the background noise. And this is by no means horrid compared to many websites.

      My browser sec plugin’s also blocks redirects, referrer tracking, social media trackers of various stripes, Doesn’t matter in the end, high security VPN with kill switch covers most else, and I never leave home without it. VPN passes TOR traffic (and my regular traffic) on an extra contorted routing within an additional tunnel (No simple RSA protocol here) that’s encrypted twice over & routed through high security servers in countries with extremely strong data protection laws, if extra security is needed, or so I can bypass my own firewall settings with TOR without compromising them.

      Pretty sad how much time you have to spend to stay up on the most current security threats/risks, most of which are corporate/government spying on us these days. Largely corporate, with Google (Alphabet Inc), Apple, Microsoft, Facebook being the largest in the game, but by no means the only players. Wide Open Media Group, who bought this place from Robert, they’re one too.

      Throw in security cam’s everywhere, with an increasing presence of facial recognition, retinal recognition, fingerprint recognition, etc. Hell, they’re actively working on pheromone recognition, tracking/spying via your own body odor. I expect touch DNA scanner methods next…

      I mean, I can hear the tin foil hat brigade SQUEEEE!!! with ecstasy at their wet dream coming true. No paranoia, or baseless conjecture needed, this is the reality.

      ***************************************************************************************
      Typical reply when I talk of such things, the retarded “What do you have to hide” passive-aggressive question.

      – Nothing of great importance, just my banking logins/passwords to keep my funds in my own pocket. Financials for the government, & market accounts. My SSN & DL#’s.

      You know, all the things that someone can acquire, stealing your identity, money, investments, and perhaps worse.

      – My highly customized computer from being cryptolockered, or intentional crashing & burning of the hardware

      – Decades worth of data (some quite valuable programs within) from being lost or stolen.

      – My Steam game account with a few hundred games, worth maybe $15k at purchase price values.

      – My gpu from being mined on without my authorization (on my power bill $$$).

      – My music collection.

      – Movie collection.

      – Personal photo’s.

      – Photos of the kids playing in the bathtub for their first bath, some sicko predator would like to get their hands on.

      No big deal right? You know, the normal stuff we keep on our computers. Which also largely have taken the place of our diary’s mind you. You share your diary with everyone? Your bank book? Yeah, I wouldn’t either.

      • I hear ya. I have so much security on my computer and laptop, it sometimes takes 30sec to open a program. Watching the system spin waiting for an email to show “sent” is not my kind of entertainment.

        The thing about Orwell’s warning is that since the ’60s, the message has been warped into the idea that he was warning about conservative governments; right wing. Always interesting that the leftists will happily embrace alleged right-wing authoritarianism if it suits their morally superior goals.

    • I maintain it would be far cheaper and far more effective to spend the money to purchase a compact pistol and a box of ammo for every resident over 18 regardless of criminal record, and encourage them to carry religiously. If the cops discover wounded while picking up the dead, finish them off and keep moving. In a week there will be no further problem. Pretending that technology + police will keep you safe from the human garbage out there is just foolish.

    • Without the police state all their oppression wouldn’t work because they are cowards that work through proxies. They need law enforcement to do their job by following their orders.

      Police love the money and it’s fun to have special powers that put you above the civilians.

      • Chief, what money? See any cops taking European vacations? I busted my ass to pay for ex’s degree. She’s probably pushing $130,000 annual. I was doing about $50,000 when I retired. I live very modestly. Cops elsewhere make more? Sure. I rented a one room apartment in NYC fifteen years ago +/- . $3000 a month. $50 worth of groceries hardly covered one day. How far do you think they’re salary goes. Well, there are the great working conditions. Nights, weekends, holidays. And the weather. It never rains. And everyone you meet is so nice. I never even loaded my weapon. Model myself after the Andy Griffith show. Moron.

        • Go look up how much cops make in the most oppressive areas. Some of the total pay is unbelievable.

          Don’t forget most people make less than cops and they have their rights restricted by those cops.

          Were you a cop 20-30 years ago?

        • If I agree on the $$ le really does not pay that well for the amount of bs involved now days.

        • I live in suburban MD, right outside of DC. I know several DC cops. None of them earn less than $140,000 a year. Between unlimited OT and moonlighting jobs, these guys are making more money than junior partners at most law firms.

        • That’s only certain departments. The vast majority of departments are not a place to go if your goal is to get rich.

        • At what age did you retire? Do you get a pension? These poor cops have such a hard and unappreciated job, it makes me cry.
          Oh, wait.
          My work as independent remodeling contractor involves bad weather, lots of heavy lifting, dust, dirt, work on my knees and in heights. According to statistics it is much more dangerous than police work. I get no health insurance, 401K, pension, no extra pay for overtime, no paid holidays, vacations or sick days. I will have to work until I die. I’m not a hero in public’s eye, I have to pay for my work clothes and have no autoritah. I can’t open carry here in Illinois, if I shoot someone, I will go to jail until it’s clear that it was legally justified.
          But I know that just like any cop, I can do something else if I don’t like it.

      • Cc I must agree most pols are pussys and need to have le do their bidding while they hide behind a security detail. I also know many newer (last 25-30 years) leo took the job because they wanted the power trip. Many old school cops had real balls, didn’t need to prove anything.

      • No one has an expectation of privacy in public. The ACLU made sure of that when they sued government to force the police to wear body cameras.

        Your fourth amendment rights mean nothing. Because that tape will be played in court. Whether or not your rights are read to you by the cops.

        • Everyone knows you can’t be totally free from view while walking out in the open. We are not talking about that. We are talking about spying on your every move so they can find something to put you in a cage for. As the example given: a cop behind you the moment you leave your house until you go back inside. There is an expectation of privacy from the government, we have a human right to be “secure.”

          There is no way a human rights advocate would say it’s okay for the government to sit in a parking lot searching every car for unpaid tickets and warrants. There is no way people would be okay with facial recognition being used in public to build a social credit score to punish you prior to your arrest for being a bad person.

          No one likes the feeling of having their mother and father following them everywhere, at all times, to make sure they never break their rules. If they don’t follow orders they get grounded. Kids will commit suicide because such oppression or they will kill their parents or they will become drug addicts.

          Americans don’t want to live like North Koreans. They think they do, but they will reject it once it happens to everyone.

        • To chief censor
          You are making excuses for Libertarians Liberals and the Left. They all demanded that the government, represented by the police, start wearing cameras to photograph and record people.

          However it didn’t turn out the way they thought. Because all the cameras have done is to prove that 99.9% of the police do their jobs. And people who complain about the cops are just lying about it.

          I personally support the idea of disarming the police. Since the Three L’s don’t trust the cops. They should start an experiment in a very blue state. New York, California, New Jersey perhaps???

        • @Chris T in KY

          Americans wanted bodycams because cops lie all the time. They murder and get away with it because lack of evidence showing what happened. The bodycams are meant to document police conduct, it’s not to spy on people. Their policy is to press the record button when they have to interact with the public.

          I would love to see beautiful California turn into a Western version of Japan. It would be the perfect place to live. Guns for the people, no police state, great land, big economy, etc. But Republicans turned it into a leftist’s dream and handed off to them to rule forever.

  1. Wouldn’t live or work there for any reason or salary. It’s position as a port keeps it alive and nothing else.

    • Most of the homicides are confined to the black neighborhoods, i.e., are predominantly black on black crime related to gangs and drugs. There are some very nice neighborhoods there, and it gets better when you get out in the County. I used to visit there on occasion when my in-laws were still alive. But the gun laws truly suck, and it is a Democratic Party bastion that will never change.

        • “Well, I need better schools, I need more jobs, more hope and opportunity, better housing”, et cetera, et cetera… No, jerkoff, you need responsible parents (a committed father and mother) actually raising their children NOT welfare queens pumping out feral critters as a result of mating with multiple male sperm contributors. That’s it bottom line but none of the Democrat “leaders” will admit that. They don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. In reality, there are too many votes at stake.

        • LazrBeam,

          Kudos to you sir or ma’am — well said.

          As usual irresponsible people look to anyone and everyone else to clean up their messes. This situation in Baltimore is no exception.

      • Taxes there are a bitch, schools suck, and all of the taxes and laws of The Fee State apply as well.

        And the winters are cold.

      • NO such thing as ‘Gun Violence’. There is only CRIMINAL VIOLENCE.

        Even on the Urban Welfare Plantation.

    • I personally know a guy (no, really) who has taken out certain street lamp clusters repeatedly because he didn’t like the bluish hue of the light. He’d shoot one out with a .22LR, it would be dark for a few months, the utility company would come out and replace it, he’d shoot it out again the very next day, it’d be dark for another few months, rinse and repeat for several street lights.

      Here in CA, we’ve already had such cameras installed at most intersections for years. This, plus the LASD and LAPD started installing LPRs on their patrol vehicles a few years ago. The current practice of wearing hats and masks is great for foiling retail chains’ facial recognition cameras (Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes, Kroger, Albertsons, CVS, Walgreens, et al, who have all admitted to it), but your travels on the road are not private.

      • Road travel, yes. I keep imagining that scene in “Casino” where Nicky switches cars a half dozen times in various parking garages.

      • What if you do not wish to be identified on their recordings?
        For dark areas or night would be fairly easy to design glasses,hats, and items to attach to your clothing that have 1/2 to 1 watt 850nm and 940nm IR wide angle LEDs embedded in them. You could use SMD devices to make the lighting even less noticeable. To humans walking towards you you have items on you that are invisible or in a real dark area emit a dim red glow if you use cheap chinese leds. To the surveillance cameras you are a blinding glare of light. It would be interesting to see their reaction to someone wanting to wear such tech. On a bright sunny day you could just wear odd shaped large sunglasses and a hat to screw with their recognition software.

        • Yes, I’ve looked into all those options, but please note that I said our current practice of hats and facial masks is taking care of that problem…at least, for the interim. That’s the only part of this COVID situation that I find “fun”.

        • Man, I’m not much for wearing hats, but I’d wear a ball cap with this tech on it just for the effect on their cameras.

        • “Man, I’m not much for wearing hats, but I’d wear a ball cap with this tech on it just for the effect on their cameras.”

          Ok, I am confused here. Are my Groucho Marx glasses effective or not? Should I keep the mustache on there, or remove it?

  2. Oh, great…the Baltimore PoPo will show up after the fact…as usual.

    But, but the Commissioner “promised” that this technology would ONLY be used within a narrow scope of crimes…like jaywalking, sunbathing and BBQ’s.

    Don’t know about Maryland, but I have a reasonable expectation of privacy in my backyard here in Montana.

    Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, et al are laughing their dead zhopa’s off.

  3. I heard China is also providing drones to U.S. police to spy on Americans who are supposed to be under house arrest because of the virus.

    The police state is becoming entrenched.

    The supreme court has ruled spying and searching is fine because you have no expectation of privacy in public. You must hide in your house with the blinds closed if you want some privacy from the police state, but these days people have devices in their homes that spy on them for corporate interest and by extension the state.

    You have no right to travel, you have no right to use public property, you have no right to be secure from spying in public, you have no right to be a capitalist…

    People should not reject wearing masks. They should integrate them into the culture for two reasons: 1. it prevents sickness, 2. you can use it to hide your identity from the spies.

    In England, kids started to wear a lot of hoodies because of all the spy cameras setup throughout the city. Americans will also have to hide from the camera by covering up. That’s how far your human rights have been suppressed by the police state. Having to wear a mask for some level of privacy in a country with a Bill of Rights.

      • If the cops and local politicians didn’t get a pass they wouldn’t dare to mention such ideas. However, Republicans gave away all their principles when three buildings fell down in 2001. Republicans have the physical tools to put an end to human right violations by their government, but they refuse to ever live up to their PR slogans.

        The Democrats don’t have the tools to fight a government. They come out to protest only to get handed an ass beating, which the Republicans cheer for.

        Now only if those two could join together: the will and the way. It is called the United States for a reason.

    • Karen is going to have so much fun ratting out people from the comfort of her home using an app on her phone.

      Imagine all those Karens sitting at home, working for free, calling the police on a bunch of black people who refuse to follow the new normal. They are going to setup an entire Facebook spy network tied to a Google app that’s funded by the government. A social credit score tied to your Real-ID soon after.

      Sweet communist tactics in the so called land of the free.

  4. It’s perfectly acceptable to give up some of your rights for a cause, laudible even.

    But you don’t get to make that choice for other people. Their rights are not yours to give.

    NAACP leader or not, the man is immoral to give a nod to this kind of government intrusion. For shame.

    • It does, but so does quarantining healthy people to supposedly prevent the spread of a virus less deadly than the seasonal flu.

  5. I cant believe all these gang bangers are carry guns and shooting people, its almost like criminals don’t obey laws.
    Get John Hopkins gun violence research team on it, they’ll have a law recommendation that will finally solve it. Meanwhile they can keep telling hospital patrons that its not safe to walk the streets.

    • The mass murderer in Canada was said to have illegally possessed two semi auto rifles and two semi auto handguns. The police believe they came from the U.S..

      How does a Canadian get an AR-15 from America into Canada? How does he get multiple illegal guns? How does he get police uniforms and vehicles? Is it legal for him to have body armor too?

      Even without the guns the wanna be cop killed 9 people out of 22 using fire. They couldn’t escape their house because he was outside with a rifle waiting for them. They burned alive. The police thought it was a great idea to tell the media to tell the people to hide in their basements until they could be saved by government.

      What’s that smell? Nine unarmed, defenseless citizens, who thought gun control was going to save them from cooking alive like a dog in rural China.

      I guess the best way to solve this is to setup cameras everywhere so police can watch the murderers live then arrest the bad man. Oh, and more gun control.

      Why does the government always choose to take more rights by giving themselves more power? Why not call up Black Guns Matter and allow the victims to take back their town? Maybe it’s because criminals don’t like when their prey has a means of harming predators?

    • He would be appalled and disapointed. To get to this point even though he warned us. He must be spinning in his grave.

  6. The last street fight I got into I wound up with a chunk of gravel in my head. It hurts when you get hit in your broken nose twice, ohh sht just about puke when He hut me again. I lost….. Then same guy, whoopin up on his old lady. ( meth) hah hah, Therese’s a difference Evidently, defending a defennceless, and just playing around, gets the sht pumoing. ,,,,a broken broom handle( it broke when I hit him in the throat) will work as a bayonet. Forward;;; Dear Take Mr Rights,,,,,we ain’t all dead yet and u ain’t seen sht

  7. They can have eyes in the sky, eyes on the gound, eyes up people’s @sses, and Baltimurder will still be a dump of epic proportions. It’s run by grifters for grifters, and it will never change.

  8. Oh yeah, for some of you guys who worked them Dust Offs, the iron smell of the blood makes me sick. I don’t know how you guys did it) do it, I can smell it now.

    • “Oh yeah, for some of you guys who worked them Dust Offs, the iron smell of the blood makes me sick. I don’t know how you guys did it) do it, I can smell it now.”

      Saw a two-page photo in the old Life magazine, a photo of the inside of one of those medevacs, filled with dead and dying. Of course, I couldn’t smell the blood, but the picture moved me from wanting to join the Army and become Special Forces, to joining the Air Force to attack from above.

      Combat medics (all services) just ain’t normal people. How is it we don’t run out of them?

  9. Funny, Baltimore is the same size, population density, and close to the same placement terrain wise as Richmond, and yet Baltimore never shed the violence problem that Richmond did. I wonder what the difference is?

  10. It’s not easy or simple but if they were serious:

    1. Remove infringements upon the common citizen to own and carry firearms. Instantly, many members of the law abiding public suddenly become dangerous to the criminal element, rather than the other way around.

    2. Form police units that focus only on identifying and hunting for repeat offenders and those with existing warrants for violent crimes. The core elements of the criminal population is doing most of the crimes.

    3. Target every level of organized crime. Disrupt their operations, constantly harass and arrest. Whether it’s mafia, cartels, gangs, whatever. If it is a organized group, give them no rest.

    4. Give outfits like CureViolence.org grants to work their angle with the inner city gangs. Working to break the revenge cycle between gangs goes a long way to reducing the homicides from street assassinations, drive by shootings and many related crimes.

    Recording everyone in public spaces? That’s all about desperation, shows they have stopped thinking, stopped paying attention to what works.

  11. Baltimore discontinues use of eyes in skies to fight gun crime after videos show 90+% was black on black.

    • They will just change their focus on other “problems”. Like who stood closer than 6′ from other person.

  12. “Deeply segregated city”??? The writer lost ALL credibility with that statement. Obviously knows nothing about the city.

    Solution: Bring back the death penalty and USE IT.

        • “…can you come up with a better way to decrease recidivism?”

          Oh yes, quite so. Something I have pushed for years.

          If a person is sentenced to jail for one day more than six months, that person is registered in the national organ transplant system. That system is populated by prisoners at every level of government. Every person on/in the registry represents a repository of human organs to be used for a non-prisoner in need. Prisoners would not be placed on life-saving equipment, should the reduction in body parts become life-threatening. After completion of sentence, if the prisoner survives, the now-diminished prisoner would qualify for body part transfer, just as for a person who was not incarcerated. A repeat offender would once again be placed on the transplant registry.

  13. So what’s the cost of the jet fuel for these constant flights? This is insane and terrifying I just thank god that my wife and I are blessed to be raising our kids in a rural area. I hear gun shots all the time but it’s just my neighbor punching paper or the gun range a few miles away.

  14. This is a continuation of John Arnold’s program from a couple of years ago. You may remember John from his days at Enron.

  15. Government sucks, and you can’t fight that yet. However, Persistent surveillance…… those anti-American, anti-rights pugs, that’s another story. If there is no company, there is no service to be offered. This will persist unless dealt with. Just not sure how to deal with it. It is clear as day now though, the writing is on the wall. Big brother is at your doorstep.

    • These would be best used while shooting out every camera you can find, a couple times a week until replacement cost causes LE to cut their own salaries. That took care of that.

  16. In a lot of these high density metro areas (Baltimore as an example) the cops don’t make much. I don’t understand the mentality to work in areas like that where any day you could be targeted by some 15 year old gang member because he felt “disrespected”. There are great cop jobs out there. I am now retired, years ago I moved to the Northwest, great place to live, great department, many years with overtime I made over 100K, and hardly any crime. I remember working the night shift and one 40 hour week without a call. imagine that, Not to sound racist but we had no black population. I attributed this to our low crime rate. it’s not racist, it’s a fact.

    • Racist people use statistics to push their hatred. They don’t use logic and history to figure out why certain groups behave the way they do. They simply say it’s because they are this color…

      • There is no doubt that blacks commit much more violent crime than hispanics, who commit more crime than whites, who commit more crime than asians. It doesn’t matter why they do what they do (murder and maim). What matters is how to stop them from doing it.

        • “What matters is how to stop them from doing it”.

          Shack !!

          Everything in life is a choice. Not making a value judgement, just noting human nature. Thus, if a person makes a choice that violates social standards (laws/regulations), it doesn’t matter why. Only question, regards crime, is whether a person’s choice is legally permissible. When Bonzo commits a crime, it doesn’t matter that Bonzo is acting out of rage because somewhere along the line, Gonzo mistreated Bonzo (different from self-defense). Doesn’t matter where Bonzo and Gonzo live, how much money they have, how many people admit to being their parents.

          One way to stop crime, is to simply execute anyone convicted, regardless of the seriousness or nature of the crime. Another way is to provide such consequence that people deciding to commit crime are convinced to not commit the crime; deterrence.

          Executing every convicted criminal is, itself, a form of deterrence (that dead criminal is permanently deterred). Interestingly, the executed criminal deterrence meets the general nature of a consequence to act as a deterrent: the execution can be physically applied; the execution is certain.

          The problem with not employing execution is that all the other deterrence methods are: uncertain as to application; uncertain as to likelihood; uncertain as to outcome. Criminals do not fear the law, they do not fear law enforcement, they do not fear jail time, they do not fear execution. And this is because the criminal sees law enforcement (justice) as uncertain/unlikely in all situations.

          The core of our notion of a justice system is that any and all criminals can, and should be, rehabilitated. Not interested in a discussion of cosmic principles of life and death, here. Only in discussing means to eradicate crime. Rehabilitation is an abject failure in the overwhelming number of instances. Punishment should be the intent of the so-called “justice system”. Punishment should be severe enough that a criminal would prefer avoidance. Yes, there are evil humans, and they can only be deterred by execution. However, punishment, versus rehab, should be the goal of society for other criminals.

  17. “McNutt says that resolution of the images aren’t sharp enough to identify faces, ethnicity, gender and clothing, nor vehicles’ color, make, model and license plate.”

    Uh huh. Then it’s a failure from the start.

      • “Given all that, what is supposed to be the point?”

        Skynet sends an alert to the cops, who respond and round-up the miscreants. As it stands, people might be able to depart the scene before the cops arrive. I would recommend Skynet be capable of spraying evil doers with indelible, vibrant ink/paint so that the criminals can be identified in a crowd.

        It is simply madness that people are free to stand outdoors and breath the air, without a prominently displayed badge proving they have permission.

        • “Save taxpayer money; skip the paint and use Kamino saberdarts!”

          An interesting idea, but darts are very specific. If they miss, a freedom loving criminal gets away. With paint, you might inadvertently tag an innocent, but the likelihood of tagging the evil doer is almost certain.

    • I think that someone’s lying to not scare the sheep. There is no one dumb enough to pay for such a poor service. How it can’t see the color of a car? Are we in ’50s?
      Imagine the public reaction to this announcement: “With today’s high res cameras, face recognition software, fixed and flying cameras integration and artificial intelligence technology, we can continuously scan the whole city and than look into any point in the past. We can find out not only who went where and whom he met, but also follow him and do the same thing for any person that person contacted. We can now create a virtual map of anybody’s social network.”. I think I’ve read about something like this in a book…

  18. Ok, please follow me on this. My wife and I both do customer service as part of our work. We sometimes share war stories in the evening, or over the weekend. Whenever she is complaining about Mr. So-and-So, at some point I will usually foolishly offer a suggestion on how to handle this or that. It is foolish, because she isn’t interested in having me solve a problem for her. She just needs to jaw about it. If I persist in my foolish advice-giving, her eyes kinda glaze over and the conversation wanes.

    She has learned by now that I’m a problem solver by trade and inclination, and can’t help it, so she’s more likely to patiently allow my interjections than she used to be. And, I am learning to discern when she actually wants advice, and try to shut up and listen otherwise. Pretty much only whenever she says, “I need your advice on something.” Point is, most of the time she doesn’t want my advice. She’s pretty smart, and very good at her job, so she doesn’t often need it. But, she’s gotta dump.

    Ok, so the point of all that is, in my opinion and only generally speaking, most of the folks in places like Baltimore, Detroit, you name the burg, really don’t want to fix things in their town. That includes the citizens and the government. If they did want better, they would try to do things that would actually result in positive change. We can discuss how and what until the cows come home, but they think we’re armchair quarterbacks and their eyes glaze over while they enact some new feckless policy. They whine and complain and bellyache to reduce stress, but not to get help. They don’t want help. The paths of least resistance make both men and rivers crooked.

    I suspect the best we can do is try to keep our own place clean and neat and in reasonably good working order, and hope our light of success shines on enough of them and makes them take notice, and get thirsty. The problem with this plan, of course, is that what happens in San Francisco doesn’t stay in San Francisco. So, I guess I don’t know after all.

    Well, I do know this. It’s time to go home and help the wife dump.

  19. Everything developed on the battlefield comes home to be used against American citizens eventually. Been warning for years, nobody listened.

  20. To defeat the drone ; Either shoot it down or as many citizens that have vehicles get out and drive around all over town which will overload possible surveillance.

    • “Either shoot it down or as many citizens that have vehicles get out and drive around all over town which will overload possible surveillance.”

      Attract the drone. When it is at a proper angle, face the drone, open your gun cover, display your fun gun, wave it for the camera.

  21. Hate to say it, but having lived in Baltimore I kinda get it. Maybe I would have fewer search helicopters flying over my house and fewer people using my back yard as an escape route.

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