It is not true that all surveillance cameras in Lancaster City are being supplied and monitored by the Lancaster Community Safety Coalition, even though Lori van Ingen’s article, “Protest to target city surveillance cameras” (Intell, June 26), gives that impression. There are cameras in northwest Lancaster that were installed and are being monitored by F&M College.
Some of these cameras are on F&M campus property, but not all. One of the cameras isn’t even in the City – it is in Manheim Twp. The monitors are located in the Safety and Security offices of F&M College and the monitoring is done by F&M employees. (One employee reviewing the images on an F&M monitor was dismissed when the College discovered that the employee was able to look through the windows of a College dorm.)
Charlie Smithgall, who was Mayor of Lancaster when the infrastructure for cameras was laid throughout the city, told a homeowner that there are more privacy safeguards with the Lancaster Community Safety Coalition cameras than with F&M, and more with cameras controlled by the City Police than with LCSC.
This is not a new issue. Race Avenue homeowners protested when F&M announced that they were putting cameras on the light poles that F&M had previously installed directly across the street from their houses. (Less than a year before the cameras were installed, F&M had denied that the College had any such plans.) College officials said they were blocking the windows – as required by law – of these houses, but did not promise any additional blocking. Many of the homeowners protested that these cameras violated their privacy rights on their own property, but they were criticized by F&M and City officials, as well as some citizens, as being against the “public good”.
Recently the College sent one of its police officers to a house across the street from one of its cameras because the monitor showed a burglar — in broad daylight –breaking into the house through a front window. It turned out that the “burglar” was a homeowner painting a front window of the house next door! The image apparently was not clear enough to show which house was being photographed.
When a homeowner who lives across the street from another F&M camera found a broken window in her car, she called F&M Security to see if there was video coverage of the vandalism. She was told that F&M had to get permission from the Lancaster City Police in order to review the tape. During a later call to F&M Security, an F&M police officer told the homeowner that the tape in question had already been erased. F&M only keeps the tapes for one month, the officer explained. Evidently, F&M is more concerned about its students’ cars than those of homeowners across the street. Yet these homeowners had been told that they would have increased security as compensation for any loss of privacy!
When two F&M students were robbed directly under an F&M camera earlier this year, there were no tapes at all of the robbery, because when this happened, the rotating camera “was pointed the other way”, according to the F&M police lieutenant who was in charge of the investigation.
When F&M installed the cameras on Race Ave., John Fry sent a letter to a Race Ave. homeowner, in which he wrote that “sacrificing private property rights for the greater good of increasing community security” was a “reasonable tradeoff”. That statement needs to be challenged by citizens who do not agree that being videotaped without their knowledge or permission while on private property that they own is reasonable, proper or acceptable.
