They’re everywhere, and they’re watching you. They’re surveillance cameras, and following 9/11 they seemingly sprouted on every building, parking garage and traffic light. The exact number installed is difficult to assess, but oft-cited market research tracks sales at 30 million cameras. In New York City 6,000 public cameras gaze upon the city. In Chicago it’s 10,000 — the densest concentration in the U.S.
While civil-liberties advocates summon the grim specter of George Orwell’s 1984 (as cities roll out software that “automatically” recognizes suspicious behavior, we can’t exactly fault them), it’s hard to argue with the results. Crime dips as the cameras roll, research appears to show.
Together with Investigation Discovery’s “See No Evil,” airing Tuesdays at 10 p.m. (9 p.m. CST), we dug through the footage and found the baffling, blood-curdling, and just plain bizarre cases where being caught on camera led to being caught.
The Abduction Of Carlesha Freeland-Gaither
By the time surveillance cameras caught sight of an old Ford Taurus parking on a Philadelphia street, Carlesha Freeland-Gaither was already being hunted. As the camera rolls, a man hops out and skitters around the edge of the frame toward the distant figure of his victim, Freeland-Gaither, a 22-year-old nursing assistant. The predator lunges and manhandles her back toward his car and the camera. The desperate woman rocks the car — even kicking out its windows — with the force of her struggle.
Soon after the abduction, Philadelphia police released the video to the public. The dramatic footage garnered national media attention, but it also spurred the interest of a team of detectives far south of Philly. Police in Virginia were searching for a violent offender named Delvin Barnes, whose DNA had been found on a teenage girl who stumbled, naked and smelling of bleach, into a local gas station.
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That at least 17 police departments and sheriff’s offices across the country have received licenses to fly drones (including the office in Grand Forks, North Dakota) was probably unwelcome news for at least four North Dakotans. They have the dubious distinction of being the first people in America arrested with the help of municipally owned drones.
According to Vice, early on Sept. 28, 2014, Grand Forks deputy sheriffs pulled over a car whose occupants they suspected of drunken driving. The four men inside the car jumped out and ran into a nearby corn field. Rather than dive into the corn themselves, deputies launched the Qube, an “unmanned aerial vehicle” that, at 3 feet long and weighing just 5 pounds, more closely resembles a hobbyist’s gadget than a law enforcement tool.
Fortunately (for the officers, anyway), the Qube comes equipped with thermal imaging technology, which allowed the deputies to track the body heat of the fleeing suspects in the autumn corn. The first suspect was picked up within minutes; none of the runners eluded the eye in the sky.
These three got “droned.”
Is the Qube the future of video surveillance? While the aerial drone has only been deployed 11 times in Grand Forks, for deputies there it seems to have become a routine policing tool. (Its footage has already been entered into evidence in court, as part of a sexual assault case.) In the future, most surveillance footage may very well be taken from the air.
Check out the all-new series “See No Evil,” premiering Tuesday, Feb. 17, at 10 p.m. (9 p.m. CST) on Investigation Discovery. #SeeNoEvil
