AHI: United States » Crime

The robocop on the beat: Part 2, seen as one seeing

admin — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:14:29 +0000

By: David A. Smith

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]

As we saw in yesterday’s post, policing is more effective and more civilized if it is preventive, a role played by the cop on the beat since first sentries walked their posts.

Twirling a jaunty billy club

In earlier times, policing was preventive (discouraging crime) or even pre-emptive (rounding up ’suspicious characters’), both of which enforce order at the cost of liberty and often justice. In today’s developed world, in our yearning for auditable justice we have migrated to a rights-based and rules-based approach to law enforcement, with heavy emphasis on post-facto procedure, and have forgotten how to be creatively preventive – except for Peoria, Illinois, as featured in a story from the Wall Street Journal:

In yesterday’s post, innovative police chief Steven Settingsgaard parked a retired police car conspicuously in front of a suspected drug dealer’s house. Overnight it was demolished, but then something striking happened:

The dealer left the neighborhood soon after the incident –

Flush a predator from cover and the animal becomes unsettled and nervous; easier to capture.

– he was later arrested and convicted on a gun charge.

Evidently the emotional disruption played a powerful role in the physical disruption.

Find me worrisome?

Still, that’s an expensive trade. Something reusable was needed.

One summer night, Chief Settingsgaard was pulling out of police headquarters when he did a double take. Rusting in a corner of the police parking lot was a hulking Brink’s truck. It had been purchased — for a dollar — to use in emergencies but had yet to be pressed into service. The chief thought it could be the perfect nuisance-deterrence vehicle, seemingly indestructible and inarguably an eyesore.

Is it an eyesore? Seems rather fetching to me, a mechanical Saint Bernard standing guard.

I’ve got a rough-hewn manly style

Over the next year, the 12,000 pounds of heavy metal got an extensive makeover, including about $10,000 in new equipment and repairs. It was outfitted with five infrared surveillance cameras, a padlocked hood, a locked gas cap, and protective screens over the head and tail lights.

In short, it became a siege tower in the war on crime – movable, durable, intimidating. An invulnerable platform for electronic eyes.

Bombard all you want; I’ll still be there

A Peoria tire company installed foam-filled tires that can’t go flat. Decals that say “PEORIA POLICE Nuisance Property Surveillance Vehicle” were pasted on all four sides of the white truck.

By its presence, the Armadillo thus several messages:

We are serious about crime.

We’re not going away.

You are being watched.

I am aware of your activities, citizen

Remarkably, its very stolidity evoked fear in those it sought to frighten:

There were some bumps along the road. When Officer Elizabeth Hermacinski, 39, the force’s nuisance-abatement officer and Armadillo driver, took the behemoth out for its first deployment in July 2008, the targeted troublemakers seemed to have gotten wind of the plan. In any case, they had parked cars in every available spot in front of the house.

A traditional defense to siege warfare – ringing the castle with a moat.

No parking next to the building

However, in any siege, there is always an outer perimeter.

So Ms. Hermacinski parked across the street, close enough to get the message across. “It’s psychological warfare,” she says.

The besiegers also have another asymmetric advantage: time on their side.

What makes the Armadillo so interesting, in a housing and community safety sense, is that its effect is not judicial but psychological.

Do I make you nervous?

The Armadillo is the opposite of an undercover operation. Its goal isn’t making arrests, but alerting suspects that police are on to them, police say.

In this, the Peoria Armadillo applies the principles of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon:

The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785.

A child of the English Enlightenment, Bentham propounded a political doctrine of utilitarianism: “the greatest good of the greatest number.”

Enlightened, if grim

Government and force were justified if they moved humanity toward greater happiness. Instead of punishment, prisons were to be social laboratories, where the penitents turned themselves toward civility, overseen by the benevolent gaze of an omniscient if not omnipotent jailer:

The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.”

In 1984, George Orwell turned the panopticon into a force for totalitarianism via the telescreen.

It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

In his corner, Winston may do the most erotic thing George Orwell could imagine:

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a particularly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however that the book was much older than that. Page 9.

With that, he begins to write his own words in this luscious book.

The potential link between official observation and repressive government is so evident that it was obvious even to its inventer:

Bentham himself described the Panopticon as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”

Bentham’s Panopticon: Guards at the center of a spider web of sight lines

Behind the power of seeing lies the power of enforcing, and so powerful is that possibility it seldom needs to be deployed.

The surveillance footage is rarely reviewed by the police and is saved for just a short time before it is erased.

After all, if nothing has happened, there is no need for evidence. The beat cop has prevented crime, which is much cheaper than having to apprehend the criminal.

Short sleeves, visible face – accessible but observing

Still, the unit can have a significant impact.

I love that its value is in being seen much more than seeing.

I don’t want you seeing mea

This past July, Maggie Wren, 50, requested that the Armadillo pay a visit to her home. Police say her adult children and grandchildren were loitering on her front porch and leaving empty beer bottles in her yard. “Every time I wake up, there’s something broken on my fence,” she says.

Police parked the truck outside her house while she went away on vacation. Police say the porch remained quiet and empty while she was gone.

One recent afternoon, Officer Hermacinski was moving the Armadillo to a new spot. “It drives like a tractor,” she said, yelling in order to be heard over the engine’s roar.

The ‘Armadillo,’ a former Brink’s truck with video cameras patrolling Peoria (Elizabeth Hermacinski).

It does drive like a tractor. Check out this video link.

She pulled the Armadillo to the curb of a white, one-story house with red siding suspected of being a drug house. She flipped on the surveillance cameras, hopped down from the truck and knocked on the door of the house. No one answered. Then she walked over to a waiting police cruiser, got in and drove away, leaving the Armadillo to do its job.

The Robocop on the beat.

Eyes on the street

By: David A. Smith