From the Roundtable: Downtown camera surveillance? A good idea, if well-planned

Now it’s up to the voters to decide whether downtown Columbia will be equipped with surveillance cameras.

The ballot issue apparently ranks in gravity with the 25-year quest for a city charter, animal control issues and periodic tussles over cable television franchises. Voter consideration of this city-sanctioned snooping will undoubtedly factor in races for mayor and two City Council seats that are up for grabs in April’s election.

Surveillance cameras are not new. Banking institutions were the earliest adaptors when film was the medium of record; they produced images that barely approached the quality of the crudest snapshots from the family’s Brownie box camera. Updated to state-of-the art high-resolution, all-electronic digital imaging is conveyable anywhere via the Internet. It’s thus aroused concerns that personal privacy and other rights could be violated.

The issue before us has been vigorously brought to the fore by a local bank executive, Karen Taylor, whose son was brutally attacked last June by a band of malevolent thugs in a city parking garage. A city-owned and supervised camera and tape storage system recorded the brutality and thus helped the police apprehend the perpetrators, whom the court system then dispatched to extended stays with the Department of Corrections. A salute to Karen Taylor for being aggressive about this, but she and members of the advocacy organization she founded need to fill out their game plan if the surveillance initiative is to succeed.

I personally have no opposition to being snooped on downtown or anywhere for that matter. Video surveillance is worldwide, perhaps developed to its greatest degree in the United Kingdom, where the first cameras were placed during the 1970s in reaction to violence that spread from Northern Ireland.

What I’m at odds with here is that the concept of installing surveillance cameras in downtown Columbia has been unsophisticated and technically limited so far. To be approved, voters will need to have the specific details of a downtown video surveillance plan rather than be asked to simply assent to the idea based on some fuzzy concept.

If state-of-the-art surveillance of the business district were that Cyclops-like contraption parked for a while at the northwest corner of Ninth and Broadway, the initiative should be opposed. A trailer was equipped with several slightly elevated and presumably agile camera pods poised to scope out the immediate area. This tryout was a hugely unconvincing misstep to me. We need a specific plan, which should include camera placement maps and various operational specifics such as camera resolution and agility, recording capability and monitoring details.

My modest proposal envisions the creation of a downtown network of marked passageways under continuous video surveillance (utilizing stationary cameras rather than some mobile contraption). One example is a route connecting Ragtag Cinema to the city parking garage at 10th and Cherry streets. Users of this “cordon sanitaire” would be assured some degree of safety, and if anything did happen, at least there would be a record of it.

There’s still plenty of time for proponents of downtown video surveillance to craft specific details of how the area should be monitored. Although a certain percentage of voters will oppose this simply because it’s their will to do so, the skeptics among us will welcome a fleshed-out plan loaded with specific details.

Without a detailed plan, there could be enough opposition next April to kill something that really should be adopted because it would benefit our central business district and the entire city and region as well.