Police Use of Cameras Sparks Privacy Concerns : Growing Role of Video Demonstrated in Case of Huntington Beach Surf Riot

It looked like a Coppertone commercial gone haywire.

Well-tanned young men in swimsuits coolly cruising the beach and across the television screen, smiling as the cameras zoomed in on them basking in the sun, smiling as they sucked down brews, and--oddly enough--smiling now and then as the cameras caught them ripping the bikini tops off young women, smashing the windows of lifeguards’ Jeeps, tipping over police cars, setting fire to an all-terrain vehicle. . . .

Rewind. Freeze-frame.

So far, Huntington Beach police have arrested 36 suspects in the arson, vandalism and rioting at the Op Pro Surfing Championship in Huntington Beach on Labor Day weekend. About 30 members of the public have submitted a total of 9 videotapes, about 300 slides and 1,000 or so prints and negatives, Sgt. James Dahl said.

That material, along with videotape shot by the surf contest’s film team and tapes of news broadcasts, were used to identify 13 suspects, Dahl said.

In fact, the evidence proved so helpful in rounding up suspects that the City of Huntington Beach this week announced a new proposal. If the city permits another surf contest, it may mount a battery of video cameras on the beach to watch the crowd.

But not everyone is smiling about the increasing role of camera technology in law enforcement.

Cameras are hardly new tools in the war against crime. Banks use them to take pictures of robbers and in automated teller machines to keep track of people making transactions.

Whether visible or surreptitious, cameras are being used by department stores, convenience stores, newspapers and hotels to keep an eye on things.

According to the Electronic Industries Assn., total sales of video cameras jumped from 114,000 in 1980 to expected sales of more than a million this year--so in a way, the public is keeping itself under surveillance as well.

Some people worry, however, that as society’s tolerance of this technology expands, civil rights may shrink.

The same weekend as the surf contest, for example, the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department in Northern California was experimenting with a new method of “educating” young people and their parents about the problems of rowdy adolescent drinking parties by videotaping those affairs for possible family viewing at a later date.

“For years, (officers) have documented what they’ve seen and heard with a paper tablet and pencil,” explained Contra Costa County Assistant Sheriff Warren Rupf. “The video camera is simply a 20th-Century method for officers to document what they’ve seen and heard.”

But Ed Chen, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in San Francisco, speculates that such filming may, in certain cases, violate search and seizure laws.

The ACLU’s bigger concern is that the increased use of videotaping by authorities will have “a chilling effect” on people wishing to exercise certain constitutional rights, he said.

The San Francisco Police Department and the campus police at UC Berkeley, for instance, have long had a policy of videotaping demonstrations, Chen said.

“Our general feeling is that the police ought not be taping activity that doesn’t involve unlawful conduct. . . . I think people ought not have to worry that they’ll be made part of a permanent record, just because they attended a rally,” he said.

The FBI and other government agencies have compiled dossiers on private citizens and then misused that information, Chen said.

“So there may be a fear of guilt by association. . . . The kids in Contra Costa County may have a similar concern,” Chen continued. “. . . How do we know how these tapes are going to be used?”

Another danger, Chen argued, is that law enforcers will begin to employ “technological overkill--using high-tech for everything.”

” . . . That may be interesting in terms of crime prevention, but you have to raise the question of whether it also gets us a couple of steps closer to having Big Brother looking over our shoulders,” he said.

Students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked similar questions last spring when they learned that the campus police had surreptitiously videotaped anti-apartheid demonstrations.

One concern raised was whether video records might affect such matters as future security clearance for government work, even for students who had demonstrated peacefully.

“It’s all over and done with. . . . We ran an experiment and decided to discontinue it,” said James Oliveri, MIT’s campus police chief, of the videotaping.

But Sgt. Manuel Barretta of the San Francisco Police Department said his department continues to videotape certain demonstrations.

“They’re out in public demonstrating for a specific reason. I don’t see what chilling effect it has. . . . A camera is a camera, whether we have it or national television has it,” he said.

Supreme Court Arguments

Last year, Marshall Krause, an attorney in Larkspur, Calif., tried to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that law enforcement agents who flew over his client’s Northern California house and photographed his marijuana garden had violated his Fourth Amendment rights against illegal search and seizure without warrant.

In an unusual alliance, Krause was joined in his argument by attorneys for Dow Chemical Co., who argued that agents of the Environmental Protection Agency were similarly at fault when they photographed plant facilities as part of an investigation on air pollution.

In the June ruling in that case, the high court ruled that law enforcers do not need a warrant to do aerial surveillance over private property as long as they remain at a lawful altitude, said Krause, who writes a column on search and seizure for the journal of the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Attorneys.

Krause cited another case, decided earlier this week, in which the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling that law enforcement officers, when armed with a warrant, may surreptitiously enter private property and search the premises without telling the owner they have paid a visit.

Taking other decisions into account, Krause said that in some situations, law enforcement agencies can be issued a warrant to enter a suspect’s home or business and surreptitiously plant a video camera to collect evidence, as is the case with wiretaps.

‘Nature of Government’

Krause doesn’t like the trend he sees. “I feel that anything the police can do to expand their authority generally is done. That’s the nature of the government.”

Raymond Surette, a professor of criminal justice at Florida International University in north Miami, views the situation in a less sinister light.

He recently studied a program, begun in 1982, in which the Miami Beach Police Department installed a “video street patrol.” Aimed at deterring crime as well as detecting it, the video patrol consisted of a combination of 100 real and dummy video cameras mounted in a shopping center that had a high crime rate.

The Newport Beach City Council had turned down a similar plan in 1968, after a heated debate over issues such as invasion of privacy. Miami later scrapped its surveillance system after three years, but the big concern of officials there, Surette says, was that the cameras would give tourists a bad image of Miami’s crime rate.

“Surprisingly, concerns over ‘Big Brother’ and ‘1984’ were raised only by media and external observers, and not by area residents who were quite ready to trade off a measure of personal privacy for a potential reduction in victimization and fear,” Surette wrote in Police Science and Administration magazine.

Surette believes that videotaping and other photographic technology will continue to be used more frequently in the legal system and that it will continue to be better accepted by a media-wise public weened on TV.

As one example of the benefits of such technology, Surette pointed to the increased use of videotaping in police booking and interrogation.

“It’s like having the public looking over your shoulder. It protects professional policemen from false accusations of abuse, and it protects people being arrested from brutality.”

Los Angeles attorney Richard Eiden said he has worked on several cases in which he used videotapes to defend clients, and he concurs that such evidence doesn’t always work in favor of the police.

As an example, Eiden read from the Dec. 31, 1984, findings of Los Angeles Municipal Judge Terry L. Smerling concerning a case that involved videotaping. In his findings, Smerling cited a detective’s testimony that “in the past, memorialization of events on film has proven embarrassing to the LAPD.”

Sgt. Larry Miller, who is conducting the Huntington Beach Police Department’s investigation into claims of police brutality at the surf contest riots, said the photos and videotapes have vindicated officers.

No Excessive Force Shown

Four of seven complaints are still under investigation and claimants are being given the opportunity to view the photo and video evidence themselves, Miller said. But he added: “The videotape we have does not show any excessive force.”

Defense attorneys, for the most part, concede that good photographs and videotapes can make awfully convincing evidence. They add, though, that innocent people can be wrongly identified from photos and tapes, and that videotapes can easily be edited to make events appear to have occurred differently than actually was the case.

Also, it must be remembered that videotapes or photo evidence are only one aspect of a whole case.

“The (John Z.) DeLorean trial is a good example,” explained Richard Hirsch, vice president of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice.

“Certainly the videotapes that were shown on television (of DeLorean allegedly agreeing to a cocaine deal) were seen as being terribly damaging. But viewed in the context of the entire case, he was acquitted.”

Following the riot at the Huntington Beach surf contest, the police asked the press and the public to turn in photos or videotape of riot scenes.

While the public reaction was positive, the media’s was mostly negative. The Police Department asked Southern California television stations for their video outtakes, but the stations refused on First Amendment grounds, a police spokeswoman said.

Jane Kirtley, executive director of the Washington-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, acknowledges that the public may be getting impatient with news organizations’ unwillingness to cooperate with some aspects of investigations.

But when news people do allow law officers to view unpublished or unbroadcast prints and footage--at least in the absence of a subpoena--”It makes me angry,” she said.

” . . . The integrity of the press is compromised when it appears it is being used as an investigative arm of the government,” she said.

‘Arms of Government’

The sole reason anyone gives any credence to the Soviet Union’s charges against U.S. News & World Report correspondent Nicholas S. Daniloff, Kirtley said, is because “this is how reporters are viewed in some countries--as arms of the government.”

As far as Dahl is concerned, though, the Huntington Beach Police Department is going to get its rioters with or without the media’s unpublished photos and unbroadcast footage.

“We’ve spent thousands of man-hours looking at videotapes and all these stills, picking out target people,” he said. “They’re slam-dunk cases. All of ‘em.”

He’s especially confident of the cases involving suspects who committed crimes, then walked up to someone’s video camera and smiled as if they were looking back through a lens at Allen Funt of “Candid Camera.”

“Sheer Neanderthal stupidity,” Dahl said of those suspects. “ . . . Our plan is to show the defense attorneys these (suspects) right on tape committing the crime. If they still want to go to court, that’s OK.”