Smile, you're on police camera

The new police surveillance camera installed recently at the entrance to Groton Long Point, at the intersection of Shore and Groton Long Point roads, is strategically located, able to watch and record everyone who enters or leaves the peninsula community.

It's sort of like an electronic gatehouse, except that many people don't even notice it's there.

I asked about the camera after hearing about it from someone who noticed that it just kind of appeared one day, Crime Eye on a pole, with a little green light warning that, well, you're being watched.

Lawrence Pagan, acting police chief in Groton Long Point, told me the camera can be monitored by supervisors at the police station. Officers can also call up an image from it on the laptops in their cruisers.

He said they expect it will be useful, during the busy summer season, to monitor car, pedestrian and vehicle traffic and keep track of the busy beach concerts at nearby Esker Point.

So far, he said, the camera or recordings from it have not been used in any criminal investigations.

"If you look across Connecticut," Pagan said about the growing used of police surveillance cameras, "you will see that there is a trend that follows the national trend."

The only other police surveillance cameras I came across around here are in New London, where they have been deployed for a couple of years, starting with some around the waterfront park downtown.

There are now cameras throughout the city, according to Deputy Police Chief Marshall Segar, and more are planned.

The New London cameras, including the most prominent, at the intersection of Bank Street and Montauk Avenue, are clearly marked with signs and are monitored at the police station.

Segar said the cameras, which are used to make recordings, have been used in investigating crimes, but he didn't elaborate.

It is interesting, I think, that communities here are drifting into the use of public surveillance cameras with little public discussion.

It's true that surveillance cameras, once a quirk of casino security, have become ubiquitous in modern culture, and we've all become accustomed to the idea of being watched while we pump gas, cash a check or shop for groceries.

Some communities, though, have balked when the watching is done in public spaces - not a business you choose to patronize - and by police.

Just last week in Newburyport, Mass., for instance, newly installed surveillance cameras were put on a 90-day trial period, after some councilors objected to the idea of filming people in public.

In Cambridge, Mass., last year, cameras that had been bought and paid for with grant money were scrapped when privacy issues were raised.

I can see the clear benefit to police to have these cameras as another crime-fighting weapon.

If, for instance, a neighbor of a house in Groton Long Point that was burglarized reports that she saw a black van parked in the victim's driveway, police can probably replay that day's video, watch the van drive into the community and read the license plate number.

If I had a business in downtown New London I might be more comfortable knowing that police were not only watching but recording everything that happens on the street out front.

And I don't have a really good argument against people who suggest: Why should people be concerned about cameras, if they are not doing anything wrong?

And yet it makes me uncomfortable to think that year by year, camera by camera, with each new innovation that allows government and businesses to more closely monitor and record our movements and transactions, that we are losing a little more privacy.

Privacy, one of the things the founders unfortunately left out of the Constitution, seems to be getting more scarce and a little more precious all the time.

This is the opinion of David Collins.