Cameras, Highway Sensors Offer Strategic Advantage to Police

Closed-circuit cameras, electronic highway sensors, and real-time computers normally used for traffic control will be Big Brother-like observers as events unfold during the Democratic National Convention.

Some of the electronic gear, which monitors street and freeway traffic from hundreds of strategic locations 24 hours a day, will be pulling double duty during the next week as Los Angeles police, sheriff’s deputies and transit security officers look for unusual activity, such as suspicious parcels left in train stations.

In recent years, Caltrans, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority have invested millions of dollars in electronic traffic surveillance equipment.

On streets and highways, the television cameras allow traffic engineers to monitor real-time traffic conditions along major streets and freeways. They can take sweeping long shots or zoom in for better views of accidents or problems on command from operators in downtown control centers.

On subway and light-rail stations, the cameras monitor passengers as they board and leave trains.

Unlike the MTA, which acknowledges that it uses its cameras for security, Caltrans and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation insist that their cameras are used strictly for traffic control.

“We will not be using the cameras for Big Brother,” said Margie Tiritilli of Caltrans, which has 150 cameras set up along freeways in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Fifteen cameras have been activated along the Harbor, Santa Monica and Pasadena freeways to monitor traffic downtown during convention week.

The city has 150 cameras mounted on buildings and poles along main streets in downtown Los Angeles, along Wilshire Boulevard to the Westside and along Ventura and Sepulveda boulevards in the San Fernando Valley.

Several are trained on Staples Center and the major streets in the area. A camera trained on Pershing Square, expected to be a staging area for demonstrations, can swivel and track car movements all the way up to Temple Street, five blocks away.

The cameras can zoom in for relatively close shots. But the zoom stops far enough from the street so that it is difficult, if not impossible, to make out facial features or read license plate numbers.

“That is by design,” said Verej Janoyan, a city traffic engineer who helps run the city’s traffic control operation from a climate-controlled room in a basement office that is served by 10 mainframe computers. “We don’t want to get into the business of law enforcement. We want to use the cameras strictly for traffic circulation. Once you get into law enforcement you get into a lot of social issues. We don’t want to go there.”

“If they are ever used for surveillance, I’ll quit,” said Larry Nelson, a long-haired techie-type engineer who was sitting behind a control panel Friday afternoon in the city’s traffic control center in City Hall East, clad in shorts and a T-shirt.

The reasons for restricting the use are complex. Chief are legal issues that would be raised about possible violations of privacy rights and civil liberties. The government agencies also say a legal nightmare could develop, if they had live tape of thousands of traffic accidents and drunk driving arrests.

As a safeguard, neither Caltrans nor the Los Angeles Department of Transportation normally tapes traffic monitors, although the ability to do that exists. Sometimes tapes are made of traffic situations for training purposes, they say.

The MTA plans to make strategic use of more than 100 cameras it has mounted at all Metro Rail stations. The cameras monitor loading platforms 24 hours a day. They are viewed by police officers and sheriff’s deputies from a command post at Imperial Highway and Wilmington Avenue.

MTA employees refer to the command post as “the Rock,” for Rail Operations Control, or Star ship Enterprise because of the bank of television sets receiving images from along the rail line. The boast is that they have more television cameras than a Circuit City store.

While the city and state agencies want to distance themselves from anything smacking of surveillance, the MTA wants to get the word out.

“We will be posting signs that Big Brother is watching,” said Marc Littman, an MTA spokesman.

In addition to using the cameras, the MTA is stepping up other security measures. More uniformed and plainclothes LAPD officers and sheriff’s deputies will be assigned to work rail stations and on board buses.