CPD Strategy to SF?

Will San Fransisco adopt our police surveillance strategies? Not likely, according to this comparison. The biggest difference right now is that SF police are just recording the action; Chicago police are actually moving the cameras, too.

In an emergency operations center one recent Saturday night, a civilian former police officer sat in front of four monitors and 16 larger screens covering a wall, conducting "missions," whirling and zooming cameras in eight neighborhoods that had seen recent spasms of violence.

"Someone has to watch (the footage)," said Garbauski, who runs missions once a week. "If there were no arrests, people would say, 'There's no one watching this. It's just for show.' "

Well? Are they just for show? The CPD says that between February 2006 and September 2007, they've made 1,407 arrests, including at least five homicides. But Jonathan Schachter, a public policy lecturer at Northwestern tells the Chronicle, "'I haven't seen any evidence that cameras are reducing rather than displacing crime.'"

AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast.