- TAMPA - Rob Milliron has never married. He has never
had kids, never been to Oklahoma.
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- Yet three Tampa police officers went to Milliron's construction
job site Monday and asked him whether he was wanted in Oklahoma for child
neglect.
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- It seems that his face wound up on a surveillance camera
in Ybor City. News cameras captured that image. A woman in Tulsa saw his
picture in U.S. News and World Report and called Tampa police.
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- She said the man in the photo was her ex-husband and
was wanted on felony child neglect charges.
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- Turns out they had the wrong man. But the experience
has turned Milliron into a vocal critic of the controversial surveillance
system.
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- "From that picture, I was identified as a wanted
person," said Milliron, 32, whose only previous brush with the law
involved a marijuana possession charge when he was 19.
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- The surveillance system uses software called Face-It
and is linked to 36 cameras throughout the Centro Ybor entertainment complex
and along E Seventh Avenue. Images taken from the cameras are compared
with a data base that includes wanted felons and sexual offenders.
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- If the image is a match, officers are dispatched to question
the person. But in this case it wasn't the system that flagged Milliron,
but simply a woman who saw his picture with a news story.
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- The plainclothes detective, accompanied by two uniformed
officers, had a copy of the magazine, folded open to the page with Milliron's
photo.
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- After producing identification, answering the detective's
questions and enduring curious stares and inquiries from his construction
co-workers, a mortified Milliron went home.
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- "He was absolutely horrified," said Cheryl
Toole, 32, Milliron's girlfriend of nine years.
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- "He said, "I was surrounded by the police today,'
" Toole recalled. "We were worried they'd come to our home in
the middle of the night."
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- Equally upsetting, Milliron said, was the fact that beneath
his photo in the magazine, a headline read, "You Can't Hide Those
Lying Eyes in Tampa."
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- "It made me out to be a criminal," he said.
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- Tampa police Detective Bill Todd, who took the call from
the Tulsa woman and interviewed Milliron, said Milliron did not seem upset.
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- "He was laughing about it," said Todd, who
spearheaded the software project that captured Milliron's image.
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- Milliron's photograph was captured in June while he was
on a lunch break in Ybor City.
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- He didn't know it at the time, but the Police Department
used his photo to demonstrate the system to local news media.
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- The software costs $30,000, but is on loan for a year
by its owner, Visionics Corp. of New Jersey, while the department decides
whether to purchase it.
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- Milliron's photo ran in the St. Petersburg Times June
30. A caption under the photo read, "The man in this image was not
identified as wanted."
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- The Times later sold the photo to U.S. News and World
Report.
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- The software system has sparked controversy nationwide.
Protesters say the "spy cameras" intrude on citizens' privacy.
Mayor Dick Greco, however, has said the system is no more intrusive than
the cameras found in banks and shopping malls.
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- Milliron, who says he plans to retain an attorney, hopes
the software system will be removed.
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- "I don't think it's right," he said. "They
made me feel like a criminal."
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