https://www.registercitizen.com/news/article/Baltimore-turns-to-aerial-surveillance-as-15237550.php
Starting Friday, the roughly 600,000 people living in Baltimore will be constantly recorded whenever they step out under the open sky.
Marvin L. Cheatham Sr., for one, knows he could be watched as he goes to a doctor’s appointment or visits friends. He’ll be spied upon in his back yard, and as he steps into his car, and when he drives around the city, his entire trip will be recorded, too.
All his movements will be captured, and he’s OK with this — even though police will have no search warrant, and the overwhelming majority of Baltimore’s citizens will have committed no crimes — because the city is so besieged by violence.
“I am so upset and angry about all these people that have died, I’m willing to give up some of my rights, as bad as that sounds, and I’m a staunch civil rights person,” said Cheatham, who led his local NAACP chapter in the 1990s. “I had 19 homicides two years ago in my neighborhood.”
For the next six months, up to three airplanes outfitted with wide-angle cameras will sweep over Baltimore in daytime flights designed to capture movements across about 90 percent of the city. Software will stitch together photos taken once each second, creating a continuous visual record to support the street-level cameras, license plate readers and gunfire sound detectors police already use to try to solve crimes.
Analysts alerted to a crime will be able to zoom in from the city-wide image and move backward and forward in time to identify the movements of potential suspects and witnesses, telling officers within hours just where to look for people who traveled to and from the scene.