Concerning the monitoring of surveillance cameras in Reading, an article states: “The hearing examiner for the Labor Relations Board, Jack E. Marino, ruled that, ‘The use of cameras to look at activities on City streets is a form of surveillance and patrol historically performed by police officers.’ The camera technology, Marino wrote, ‘has simply enhanced the patrol work already performed by police officers.’”
“There is, he wrote in his decision, ‘no meaningful difference between an officer observing a City street corner from his police cruiser one hundred yards away and a person observing that same street corner from the VSU monitors on the other side of the city…. The City’s police officers have historically and exclusively monitored and patrolled the city’.”
WATCHDOG: That cameras in Reading are city-owned but privately owned in Lancaster may not prove pivotal should the police union in Lancaster raise an objection. If nothing else, the City of Lancaster is now at the union’s mercy which does not bode well for future labor negotiations.
Anyone who says “The City’s police officers have historically and exclusively monitored and patrolled the city” is either a fool or thinks he is dealing with fools.
Busybodies have always kept an eye on their own neighborhoods, to a degree that a cop passing by in a squad car cannot possibly do.
In Reading, they had employees monitoring city-owned cameras. In Lancaster, there are volunteers monitoring cameras that are owned by an organization. If they had a ruling in Reading that only police officers could examine the tapes from cameras at ATM machines, that would be a problem for Lancaster.