The city of Baltimore is to be monitored by surveillance airplanes for up to six months next year under a pilot program announced on Friday that is aimed at helping law enforcement investigate violent crime and that would effectively restart a tactic secretively used three years ago.
The flights, which civil liberties groups oppose, are to start in May and gather footage during the hours when the city experiences high rates of crime.
The announcement marks a reversal for Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison, who previously expressed skepticism over the use of the planes and described the idea as an “untested” crime-fighting strategy.
“We will be the first American city to use this technology in an attempt to solve and deter violent crime,” Harrison told a news conference.
He said he believes they could prove to be “yet another tool” to fight the violence plaguing the city.
The three planes would fly simultaneously, covering about 90 percent of the city, Baltimore police spokesman Matt Jablow said.
The resolution of the footage would not be sharp enough for officers to identify faces, but should help them track movement and action.
The testing would align with the city’s historically most violent months and would be focused on homicides, shootings and robberies, including carjackings.
Harrison said police would not have access to live feeds, and instead, officers would receive “evidence packages” of specific crimes that have already being reported.
Footage from the pilot program would not be used in cases of police misconduct.
Baltimore is experiencing one of its most violent years on record, with more than 330 homicides so far, up from 309 total last year.
The city has also seen more than 1,310 armed and unarmed commercial robberies and carjackings. It wrapped up last year with 1,361 of those cases.
Harrison acknowledged the controversial history of the planes and promised a series of public meetings to inform the community “on how the program will and will not be used going forward.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS