Civil libertarians, city officials and citizens in Baltimore were shocked this week to find out that police have been conducting a city-wide aerial surveillance program they never publicly revealed, but it’s happened in other cities, including Compton.

Officials there answered frankly, when asked why the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department did not disclose that for nine days in 2012, a camera-mounted single-engine Cessna provided by an Ohio company surveiled every inch of the 10.1-square-mile California city.

“The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,” sheriff’s sergeant Doug Iketani said.

“A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush,” Iketani said.

His comments were made to journalists with the Center for Investigative Reporting, which examined new technologies police departments are using to fight crime and the civil liberties concerns raised by them.

The piece focused heavily on Persistent Surveillance Systems, the Dayton, Ohio-based company that provided the technology for Compton, as well as Baltimore, and a host of other cities.

As with Compton (which ultimately opted not to use the system) Baltimore is being criticized most for the way it was instituted without the public’s knowledge. Instead of being funded through the city spending board, the Baltimore city Board of Estimates, it was paid for by a Texas couple and passed through a non-profit entity, the Baltimore Community Foundation.

The existence of the Baltimore surveillance program was revealed Tuesday by a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story “Secret cameras record Baltimore’s every move from above” – that brought a hornet’s nest of media to police headquarters yesterday.

But unlike the Compton sheriff, the Baltimore police spokesman denied that the surveillance was conducted in secret.

“Secrecy is your word – it’s not a secret program,” spokesman T.J. Smith said. “We would have talked about it publicly. Secret is not the correct term. It’s not a secret spy program.”

Smith likened the surveillance program, which he said was conducted for 100 hours in January and February and 200 hours this summer, to Baltimore’s 700 CitiWatch cameras.

“We’ve added onto our robust CitiWatch program and we don’t have press announcements to announce we are doing this,” Smith said.

Big Leap Beyond CitiWatch

The technology provided by Persistent Surveillance, however, is much more powerful and broader in scope than the CitiWatch program, in which fixed cameras record activity block by block.

As the company’s founder Ross T. McNutt has explained – as he has marketed his system to law enforcement from Mexico to Philadelphia – the system gathers footage over 30 square miles at a time. The footage is stored – “for weeks,” according to the Bloomberg article – and can be reviewed in order to gather information about crimes.

McNutt has noted that the system produces pixellated, low-resolution images in which faces cannot be distinguished. But it is intended to be used by police in conjunction with witness accounts and CitiWatch footage to track movement and help police identify criminals. He had described the system, which can go backwards and forwards in time, as “GoogleEarth, with TiVo capability.”

Smith said yesterday that aerial surveillance was used to help police identify the person who in February shot an elderly brother and sister as they walked on Clifton Avenue in the Western District.

That sweeping capacity to coordinate data is one reason the American Civil Liberties Union has been warning against the system for years. ACLU senior analyst Jay Stanley said it differs in important ways from CitiWatch.

“Those cameras do not cover every square inch of the city, and their feeds are not stitched together with an artificial intelligence agent that is capable of using them in a coordinated fashion to follow individuals around anywhere within a 30-square-mile area,” he wrote. “Make no mistake: this technology is a big leap toward an unknown surveillance future.”

He also noted that the system has been used for more than major crime-fighting.

Persistent Surveillance staffers monitoring footage gathered from above Baltimore in recent months, the Bloomberg article said, tracked not just violent criminals but people allegedly stealing wood and protesters outside the courthouse awaiting the verdict in the trial of Caesar Goodson, one of the police officers charged in connection with the in-custody death of Freddie Gray.

ACLU: “A Privacy Nightmare”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland yesterday condemned the program as “a privacy nightmare” and called on the City Council to hold hearings to prevent it from ever being adopted.

“The fact that the BPD has been engaged in a secret program of mass surveillance is both incomprehensible and unacceptable,” said ACLU of Maryland staff attorney David Rocah. “It is even more astounding that this could be done during a Justice Department investigation into the BPD that found pervasive racial bias and lack of accountability.”

Rocah said the system is “the equivalent of requiring each of us to wear a GPS tracker whenever we leave our homes, something that would never be tolerated in the physical world.”

A spokesman for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told the Baltimore Sun she was made aware of the program “recently” but would not say when. The Baltimore Community Foundation acknowledged that anonymous donors provided $120,000 for the program through its Baltimore Police Foundation Special Grants fund.

“Recent payments from this fund have been used to purchase food for community events, trophies for sports teams, and items for the city police museum.” the Foundation said in a statement on its website.

Other Cities Disclosed

Not all of the cities who have tried Persistent Surveillance have done so in secret.

The police and City Council in Dayton “were sold on it” according to Bloomberg, but held a series of public hearings to let the community weigh in.

“At the hearings, nobody spoke in favor of it except for the people working for the city,” said Joel Pruce, who teaches Human Rights Studies at the University of Dayton and led opposition to the surveillance.

“The black community in particular said we’ve seen this type of thing before. This will target us, and you didn’t even come to us before hand to see how we’d feel about it,” Puce told Bloomberg.

Amid community criticism, Dayton opted not to go forward with McNutt’s system.

Compton ultimately rejected the aerial observation too, in part, because it had already been satisfied with the results it got from video cameras it had installed in nine city parks.

Sheriff’s spokeswoman Nicole Nishida told the Los Angeles Times that the department also decided not to go ahead with a full deployment of the eye-in-the-sky because “it didn’t enhance the law enforcement capability of the department.”