Can Technology Thwart Crime?

As I mentioned previously, I was not paying full attention at the Jan. 10 City Council meeting when the Highland Global Strategies presentation was taking place. I did see some of it later on television and one part has me wondering about how police can actually prevent a crime through technology.

As I understand what was being said, police could use facial recognition on surveillance cameras to identify known offenders and if at some point cameras detected a meeting of, say, five such characters, police could move in to ward off crime from happening.

As a citizen and somewhat of a worrywart, I have had experiences where I suspected someone's intentions and called police, only to be told to call back when a crime was actually committed.

One incident involved a man living in a car in Lot 7, just outside our building. He was using a large knife to open food cans. When he woke up in the morning, he would get out and stretch and kind of study the building. Because there is a fire escape with access to one of our windows, I was concerned that this obviously needy person might decide at some point to break in. Speculative, yes. But I wanted the police to find out more about this guy's situation. No dice.

So say a senior looks out of a window in a high-crime neighborhood and sees five known hoodlums in a huddle. Would she get the same response? Would having facial recognition technology and camera surveillance of such a get-together make a police response any more likely? Or even legal?

Now, as it happened in another instance, someone in our building heard some guys standing by the fence next to the fire escape and actually discussing how easy it would be to climb up and break in. In that case, police responded at once.

The question is whether, without any indication of intention to commit a crime, police could move in on an individual or group, even if they were known to police from past encounters. Some might say police already do run up on folks sometimes, technology or no. But if an incident went to court and all the police could say was that they thought something was about to happen, what would the judge say?

Crime has been one of the top issues in Plainfield as far back as I can remember, although in a couple of recent political campaigns it was not stressed as much as in the past. Major crime has gone down according to statistics gathered by the FBI in the past few years, but the crime rate per 1,000 remains high, compared to neighboring towns. Public safety costs are now front and center as municipal resources are being squeezed to the limit. This subject demands a lot more thought and discussion if Plainfield is to make any progress in this new decade.

--Bernice