Ramona Escareno once watched a man run naked along a Metro Rail platform. She has observed people jumping down onto the tracks to retrieve dropped items. She's watched fights break out, including one in which a woman beat up a man. But mostly, she's seen people patiently waiting for trains.
"They know they're being watched," said Escareno, one of the employees who monitor feeds from about 400 cameras placed at stations along the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's rail lines.
Every day in the Southland, cameras watch as citizens ride Metro Rail, conduct business in government buildings and sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic on freeways.
After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Los Angeles and other major cities nationwide scrambled to install the latest in security surveillance equipment. The technology has sharply improved since the days when surveillance cameras were linked by wires to VCRs. Now, recording in some locations is digital and controlled by personal computers. Sophisticated high-resolution cameras can scan distances of six blocks or more.
"Prior to 9/11, security was the last thing to be put in; it was typically an afterthought after the building was built. Now it's usually thought about first," said John Russell, president of RD Systems. The Tustin-based company has been installing security systems in Los Angeles city-owned buildings for 22 years. Since 9/11, RD has been inundated with business, he said.
Such camera surveillance has again come to the fore since the bombings in Britain last week. Officials in London, which leads the world in video surveillance -- with 6,000 such cameras in the Underground alone -- hope cameras will reveal more about the bombings, which killed at least 49 people and wounded more than 700.
Although Los Angeles, like most U.S. cities, remains far behind London in the scope of its surveillance, officials hope cameras here will help fight crime -- and even terrorism. But that, say others, may be far too ambitious a goal.
"What happened in London was horrible, but video surveillance was obviously not an effective deterrent despite the fact that London was the most surveyed city in the free world," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty project for the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's foolish law enforcement."
He suggests rather that video surveillance creates a so-called displacement effect, moving crime from within a camera's view to outside its reach.
