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A Los Angeles Times story earlier this week reported that there's been little outcry about the 165 closed-circuit TV cameras surveilling Lancaster — but that's about to change.
The Lancaster Coalition for Peace and Justice will hold a rally to express opposition to the video surveillance at noon Saturday in Binns Park.
Bill Adams, an LCPJ volunteer, said the group has been planning its strategy to oppose the surveillance for six weeks.
According to Adams, the L.A. Times story — "Lancaster, Pa., keeps a close eye on itself" — "gave the impression that there was no organized opposition."
"But we'd always planned on a demonstration," Adams said. "This just ramped up our plans, and we decided to strike while the iron is hot."
Alan Nitchman, a senior at McCaskey High School, will speak from a youth's perspective about the effects of video surveillance at Saturday's rally.
Charlie Crystle, a business adviser and School District of Lancaster school board candidate, also will speak. According to his blog, Crystle has been speaking out against the surveillance cameras since last July, when he "pleaded" with city council and Mayor Rick Gray to "bring the cameras under city control so the operation of them was at least subject to public scrutiny, Sunshine laws and other controls that ensure accountability, oversight and transparency."
Adams said he and his son, Sgt. 1st Class Brent Adams, who was killed in Iraq in 2005, took a 120-mile hike in the United Kingdom in 2004 and found bucolic, centuries-old cities with signs at the entranceways stating they were under surveillance around the clock.
"It made me apprehensive," Adams said, "and I said 'Thank goodness it's not here at home.' "
But now it is, and that disturbs Adams even more.
Adams said the installation of the 165-camera video surveillance system was carried out in a "stealth-like fashion" with little publicity.
"I wake up one morning," Adams said, "and find out that we are the most heavily surveilled city in the nation and, possibly, the world."
He said that when the Lancaster Community Safety Coalition — a quasi-public entity that monitors the cameras without official government oversight — held its public meetings last spring, they were more like presentations about what was going to happen instead of an opportunity for the public to ask probing questions.
"I feel there needs to be an open forum in a two-way fashion," Adams said.
He said that when video surveillance is installed, there is a perception that security is higher, but that the statistics don't bear that out. Criminals just migrate from areas with cameras to areas without cameras, he said.
Another concern, Adams said, is that there's no oversight of the volunteers who monitor the cameras.
"What credentials do they have?" he said.
Adams is concerned that one of the volunteers might have a grudge against someone and use the video footage as leverage against that person — or use the footage as some sort of "social sorting … constantly tracking people based on if they look right."
"I don't feel in a free society that's appropriate," Adams said.
E-mail: lvaningen@lnpnews.com
