- On a warm afternoon on Chicago's West Side, a young African-American
man leans against the wall of the One Stop Food and Liquor store at the
corner of Chicago Avenue and Homan Street. His puffy black jacket is so
oversize that the collar hangs halfway down his back. Thirty feet up, a
camera mounted on a telephone pole swivels toward him.
-
- Three miles away, in a bunkerlike, red granite building
near Greektown, Ron Huberman watches the young man on a PC screen. "You
see that guy?" asks Huberman, the 33-year-old chief of Chicago's Office
of Emergency Management and Communications. "He's pitching dope -
you can tell. Fucker."
-
- The corner of Chicago and Homan used to be a haven for
dealers slinging heroin and rock cocaine, the heart of a gangbanger free-fire
zone. In 2003, the Windy City had 598 homicides, making it the country's
murder capital.
-
- "We've gotta figure out where's he keeping the goods,"
says Huberman, his voice breaking from a bout with the flu. "We're
gonna go on the air" - call for a police car - "and bust him."
-
- With a move of his mouse, Huberman pans to the right.
We're looking down at a second man, in a beige coat. He has a brown paper
bag in one hand and a wad of cash in the other. "He's involved,"
Huberman says, staring hard at the screen. No cop, even undercover, could
ever get this close for this long. But the cameras - housed in checkerboard-patterned,
2-foot-tall boxes the police here call pods - can zoom in so tight I can
see the wisps of a mustache. Huberman decides not to have his suspected
dealers picked up; too much of an Enemy of the State move to pull with
a reporter around, perhaps. But the footage will be stored for review by
antinarcotics teams. "Now you see the power of what we're doing?"
Huberman asks, still staring at the screen.
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- IT has been key to crime-fighting since patrol cars got
radios in the 1920s. A couple of decades ago, London started installing
surveillance cameras. In the 1990s, New York began crunching crime statistics
and produced a near-miraculous improvement in public safety. By comparison,
Chicago was a Cretaceous backwater.
-
- But Chicago has evolved. A pilot network of 30 cameras
keeps watch over the West Side, capturing images that have been used in
more than 200 investigations. It's the first step on the way to a 2,250-camera
system. And the electronic eyes are merely the most visible part of a strategy
to completely remake police work in Chicago. A massive set of databases
now collects and collates the minutiae of law enforcement - everything
from mug shots to chains of evidence. Installed in patrol cars, it turns
every PC in every station house into a node on a crime-fighting network.
At headquarters, superintendents and commanders use it to pore over patterns
of criminal behavior, figuring out how to deploy swarms of cops. Today,
the murder rate is at its lowest point since the mid-'60s.
-
- By embracing the cameras, the network, and this immensely
powerful database, Chicago's once-creaky police force has become an inspiration
for departments around the country looking to get spry. "There has
never been another comprehensive program like this in a major police department,"
says Northwestern University political scientist Susan Hartnett, who's
been studying the CPD for more than a decade. Whether it means the end
of crime or the beginning of the surveillance state - or both - Chicago
is building the future of law enforcement.
-
- Officer Dave Dombkowski spent 13 years on the streets
of Chicago before he went to work for Huberman. Today he's staring at the
face of a thug on the screen of his gunmetal-gray laptop.
-
- We're looking at a local street gang leader busted 16
times since 1996 - for heroin, DUIs, sex abuse, murder. We know all that
because of a network of databases called Clear - Citizen Law Enforcement
Analysis and Reporting. Clear lets Dombkowski tab through every mug shot,
every alias, every scar. Give Clear a partial address, a nickname, a description
of that tattoo on your perp's right arm, and it will track him down - even
bring up his picture, for proof. The old databases would cough up information
only if suspects gave their real names to the arresting officers, which
happened about as often as the Cubs win the World Series. When Dombkowski
was a patrol officer, he would trick people into the truth, telling them
that the computer in his car was actually a new-jack polygraph, a "lie
box" that could sort out fact from bullshit. But with Clear in his
car, there's no more lying to Officer Dombkowski. No more tricks. "This
is the real lie box," he says. "We can tell who you are."
-
- Online rap sheets are really just a sliver of what Clear
knows. In the station houses and at police headquarters, the database has
become a kind of central nervous system for Chicago crime-fighters. It
tracks all 466,000 pieces of CPD evidence, from recovered cigarette butts
to confiscated drugs. But perhaps most important, it makes clear - and
even predicts - patterns in the timing and geography of criminal behavior.
That lets CPD chiefs know where to hang cameras. And it tells commanders
like Jim Keating where to send troops.
-
- A 25-year veteran - old-school enough to call police
"coppers" - Keating heads up the department's Targeted Response
Unit, a squad of 240 of Chicago's most amped-up officers assigned to the
most crime-ridden neighborhoods of the city. It's not a stretch to call
TRU the system's fist.
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- On his PC, Keating calls up Clear and shows me his hunting
grounds. It's a map of the 25th District, near the city's northwest border.
Every crime in the 25th from the past month is marked with an icon - black
masks for robberies, orange bodies for homicides, blue guns for aggravated
batteries with firearms. "Before, it would take six to eight months
to develop a set of contacts in your district. And we had to rely on the
detectives to put together the patterns," Keating says. "Now,
it's click, click, click, and we have it all citywide." The 25th's
map is dotted with a half-dozen blue guns, six black masks, and two orange
corpses. Keating sends one of his guys to get me a Kevlar vest; we're going
to the 25th tonight.
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- Sitting next to me in the back of a patrol car buzzing
down North Avenue, Officer Danielle Philp - she goes by Nicky - is hoping,
begging, for someone to do something wrong and give her a little action.
"We're out here hunting, hunting all the time," she says, adjusting
her red ponytail as we fly past the Planet Earth African Hair Braiding
Salon and the Ea$y Ca$h stand. Kerry DeLisle, with deep dimples and a devilish
smile, has the wheel. Their sergeant calls them the Evil Stepsisters. Another
officer, Everardo Bracamontes, rides copilot.
-
- When I tell them I'm writing a story about police technology,
the Stepsisters laugh. "Oh yeah," Philp says, "we're soooo
advanced." Clear is cool, sure - if you're back in the station house.
Right now, only about 50 patrol cars have it, and this isn't one of them.
That's slated to change when Verizon switches on its high-speed cellular
network, unleashing enough bandwidth to connect thousands more. Meanwhile,
the Panasonic Toughbook laptop mounted in between the two front seats looks
like it would choke on Windows 3.1. It takes only a couple of hours out
on patrol to see how badly they need an upgrade.
-
- The night starts out quiet. They bawl out a teenager
for pissing behind a KFC. They pull over a gray Cadillac for running a
red light (or maybe it was a yellow). Then, as they search a silver Dodge
Magnum station wagon, the call comes. "Nick! Robbery on Cicero!"
DeLisle screams as Philp hustles back into the car.
-
- Bracamontes hits the lights. Sirens blare. Cutting past
an SUV, DeLisle yanks the wheel hard to the right, sending me thumping
into Philp. The radio says to be on the lookout for a carjacked green Intrepid,
headed north. As they hit Cicero Avenue, they see the vehicle - maybe.
But it's going south. And it's gray, not green. If they had Clear in their
squad car, they might have been able to get updates on the Intrepid's description
or run its plates. Bracamontes yells that it's the wrong car, but DeLisle
follows anyway, cursing. "Move!" she yells at an ambulance puttering
in front of us. "We move for you all the time! Now get out of our
way!"
-
- The Intrepid spins right, now heading west on Chicago
Avenue. A half-dozen other police cars have joined the chase, and they
pin the Intrepid in at Kilbourn Avenue. Officers pile out, guns drawn.
For a moment, everything is quiet. If there were a pod camera nearby, the
cops back in Huberman's headquarters could get a look at the man behind
the wheel or run the license plate number. But there isn't. "I knew
this wasn't it," Bracamontes mutters.
-
- But then the Intrepid takes off - plowing over an officer
and, we hear later, snapping his leg. Two blocks further on, in front of
a town house, we come upon the Intrepid, empty. He's on the run, but the
place is already swarming with badges. The Stepsisters take that as their
cue to leave. When they get Clear in their car, they'll be able to submit
paperwork on the chase and the rundown from their laptop - but if they
stay tonight, they'll spend the rest of the shift at the station house,
filling out reports.
-
- Not that they manage to avoid some paperwork. In the
25th District's dingy, fluorescent-lit station house, Bracamontes uses
two fingers to try to enter an arrest report into Clear. He can't quite
swing it. "Hey, man," he says in a half-whisper to another cop,
"got any paper?"
-
- Clear was born out of anger and frustration. Chicago
had been trying to upgrade its computer network for most of the 1990s,
in timid fits and starts. A 1999 rollout of an automated case reporting
application went so badly that a detectives' newsletter warned the IT guys
to watch their backs on the street. So the CPD decided to start from scratch
with a database for arrest reports and case histories. As the system began
to take shape in 2000, Ron Huberman returned to the department from a stint
with a think tank in Washington, DC. Just 28 years old, with a crew cut
and cordwood arms, he had already spent four years as a beat cop and gang
specialist in Rogers Park, working nights while studying for dual master's
degrees - in business administration and public policy - during the day.
Coming back to Chicago, Huberman had a kind of epiphany. All of the department's
district houses had already been linked in a 500-mile fiber-optic network,
thanks to 1980s and 1990s investments. New York was already making statistics-based
policing famous with its CompStat system. But in New York, information
flowed only one way, up to the chiefs and the crime analysts, who then
ran the numbers and sent reports and data out to the rest of the city.
Huberman believed that fiber could help the police figure out who the real
crooks were. Information could gush in every direction, linking systems
from investigations to evidence tracking to personnel management to community
involvement. Oracle bought into the idea, contributing $20 million in time,
software, and hardware. The eventual result was Clear.
-
- In 2003, Huberman - by then an assistant deputy superintendent
- started Operation Disruption, a pilot program to string 30 surveillance
cameras along the West Side. The idea was simply to put the silent sentries
up on telephone poles, to let the bad guys know they weren't invisible
anymore. During its first seven months, drug-related calls to the police
in those neighborhoods went down 76 percent; serious crimes dropped by
17 percent. It's hard to tie correlation to cause, but the broad anticrime
strategy - surveillance cameras, real-time data updates, and smarter deployment
of tactical police units - seems to have helped bring down the body count.
The city had 445 killings last year, a 25 percent drop from 2003. "This
is about restoring a sense of order, about taking streets from the gangbangers,"
Huberman says.
-
- Police departments often tout the latest toys and gadgets
as the way to win the war on crime. Usually these programs are tepid solutions
to systemic problems. Or they're great ideas too narrowly deployed. But
what's happening in Chicago is different. No police force this size has
ever gone this digital. No major department has ever connected so many
street cops to so much information, or backed them up with a vast network
of cameras.
-
- Now the Chicago model is spreading. Nearly 300 local
law enforcement agencies in 35 Illinois counties have tapped into Clear.
So have agents from the FBI, Secret Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms. Officials from the LAPD have been to Chicago to
study the system; the mayor of San Francisco cited Chicago when he touted
networked surveillance cameras for his city's most dangerous neighborhoods.
In Washington, DC, police department tech czar Phil Graham is designing
a regional data hub that he says is "absolutely inspired by Clear."
-
- All that support has fueled Huberman's next big idea:
Expand the panopticon even further, to include more than 2,000 private
and public surveillance cameras around Chicago. Huberman has snared $34
million from the Department of Homeland Security, and another $5 million
from the city, to put 250 more cameras downtown and link them to Chicago's
emergency center through the city's fiber backbone.
-
- In other surveillance cities, like London, squads of
monitor jockeys have to make sense of confusing, overlapping video feeds.
Huberman plans to make all that observation more focused. Every day, his
911 emergency hotline gets 18,000 calls; once the cameras get linked, every
911 call will turn on the nearest camera, showing dispatchers the scene
in real time.
-
- Funded with $3.5 million from local drug busts, the next
wave of pod cameras will have audio sensors that listen for gunshots (and
distinguish between them and similar noises, like the pop of a firecracker).
Software will scan the video feeds for suspicious behavior. Come too close
to a restricted government building, leave a package on an El platform,
or even hang out for too long on a ghetto street corner and - smile - you're
on Criminal Camera.
-
- All this technology has some longtime Chicago community
activists squirming. History has provided several reasons to mistrust the
police. Former Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley's notorious Red Squad snooped
on such groups as the League of Women Voters and the American Jewish Congress,
and kept files on 200,000 Chicagoans. The unit was officially disbanded
in 1981, but in 2002, the police infiltrated five antiglobalization protest
groups and then undertook four more unspecified "spying operations"
a year later, according to the Chicago Tribune. Reports of corruption on
the force are still all too common. "It's almost inevitable, considering
the nature of the Chicago police, that we're going to hear about abuses
regarding this technology," says Representative Bobby Rush, a former
Black Panther who has represented the South Side in Congress for 13 years.
-
- For years, the CPD's solution to street crime was to
clear the sidewalks. A controversial 1992 anti-loitering law allowed police
to arrest entire groups of people if just one of them was a known gang
member. The US Supreme Court struck down the law in 1999 as a violation
of the right to free assembly. Critics worry that the cameras and tactical
units are more of the same - and see in other cities evidence to support
their fears. In New Orleans, for instance, surveillance cameras were originally
envisioned as witnesses that couldn't be intimidated. The problem, critics
say, is that the cameras make the streets so unfriendly that no one feels
comfortable leaving the house, whether they're planning to break the law
or not. One inarguable effect, says NOPD detective Mike Carambat: "You
put one of these cameras up and these thugs, they scatter like roaches
in the spotlight."
-
- Critics also note that surveillance cameras seem to get
pointed at certain minority groups. One Hull University study found that
"nine out of ten targeted surveillances were on men, particularly
if they were young and black." Another discovered that blacks were
twice as likely as whites "to be surveilled for no apparent reason."
Paul Jakes Jr., a reverend whose Old Saint Paul Missionary Baptist Church
is not far from where Chicago's first surveillance camera was mounted,
says the pods are another way to turn his neighbors into suspects. "They
have criminalized the whole community," thunders Jakes, who ran for
mayor in 2003, partially on a platform of keeping the cops in check.
-
- Yet not every community leader agrees with Rush and Jakes.
"People are asking for these cameras; there's not enough to go around,"
says Ed Smith, an alderman on the West Side. "Look, I'd love to live
in a community filled with elegance, opulence, and complete serenity. But
that's not the case. So we have to do what we have to do in order to keep
our citizens safe."
-
- That's pretty much the city hall line, too. Richard M.
Daley, who won a fifth term in 2003 by defeating Jakes with 79 percent
of the vote, had a simple, unapologetic message when he introduced the
gunshot-sensing cameras last year. He stood up at a press conference and
said: "We own the street."
-
- Back in the Emergency Management Center, Sergeant Greg
Hoffman is watching a pair of suspicious fortysomethings on a 10-foot wall
of video monitors. From a half-block away, the sergeant sees one deal go
down. And then another. "Maybe they really need the money," Hoffman
later muses. "Maybe they think that we can't see from this far away."
Whatever. He calls in a local antidrug team, which recovers 14 tiny tinfoil
packets of heroin. "When we locked 'em up," Hoffman says, "we
told 'em: We can see you. We are watching. Let the people know."
-
- The 'Clear' Way to Fight Crime
-
- Scrutinize: Chicago's pilot network of 30 cameras, soon
to be expanded to more than 2,000, will also sense gunfire and zoom in
on trouble in response to 911 calls.
-
- Analyze: This year, patrol cars will be hooked into a
database that connects officers to rap sheets, evidence logs, mug shots,
and real-time updates.
-
- Mobilize: The same database collects crime statistics
and parses geographic patterns, so police know where to deploy members
of the Targeted Response Unit. Noah Shachtman (noahmax@inch.com) wrote
about online detectives in issue 12.08.
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Publications Inc. All rights reserved. © Copyright 2005, Lycos, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
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