The City Of Camden, New Jersey Is Under Intense, Military-Style Surveillance

Monday, December 30, 2013
By Paul Martin

PAMELA ENGEL
BusinessInsider.com
Dec. 30, 2013

Big Brother is watching Camden, N.J.
A Rolling Stone article published earlier this month highlighted the intense surveillance tactics police have employed in an effort to drive out drugs and reduce crime in Camden, one of America’s most dangerous cities.

It sounds pretty intimidating:

Energized county officials say they have a plan now for retaking Camden’s streets one impenetrable neighborhood at a time, using old-school techniques like foot patrols and simple get-to-know-you community interactions (new officers stop and talk to residents as a matter of strategy and policy). But the plan also involves the use of space-age cameras and military-style surveillance, which ironically will turn this crumbling dead-poor dopescape of barred row homes and deserted factories into a high-end proving ground for futuristic crowd-control technology.

One hundred and twenty-one cameras cover virtually every inch of sidewalk here, cameras that can spot a stash in a discarded pack of Newports from blocks away. Police have a giant 30-foot mobile crane called SkyPatrol they can park in a neighborhood and essentially throw a net over six square blocks; the ungainly Japanese-robot-style device can read the heat signature of a dealer with a gun sitting in total darkness. There are 35 microphones planted around the city that can instantly detect the exact location of a gunshot down to a few meters (and just as instantly train cameras on escape routes). Planted on the backs of a fleet of new cruisers are Minority Report-style scanners that read license plates and automatically generate warning letters to send to your mom in the suburbs if you’ve been spotted taking the Volvo registered in her name to score a bag of Black Magic on 7th and Vine.

Surprisingly, Camden residents (some of them, anyway) don’t seem too bothered by it.

The Rest…HERE

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