PROTESTERS ASSAIL RISING USE OF POLICE CAMERAS

ith dozens of uniformed police officers looking on -- not to mention those
who might have been watching on a video monitor in a precinct house -- more
than 200 New York City residents rallied in Washington Square Park yesterday
against the Giuliani administration's increasing use of surveillance cameras
to fight crime.

The hourlong protest came a month after the police installed two cameras on
light poles along the southern edge of the park to discourage the
small-scale drug dealing that had become as common there as dog-walking and
hand-holding.

Under a plan announced a year ago by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Police
Commissioner Howard Safir, surveillance cameras have already been installed
in some housing projects, and the Mayor and the Commissioner, reporting
sharp drops in crime as a result, have pledged that more cameras are coming
soon to other public spaces.

"We're at a point where we now have many more requests for cameras than we
have cameras, or than we're ready yet to do, because we want to make sure
we're doing this in a careful way," the Mayor said yesterday.

The protesters argued that surveillance cameras in public places smacked of
a police state. They said the cameras would destroy the kind of privacy in
public places that New Yorkers have come to expect, eroding the quality of
life for law-abiding city residents far more than they would help catch and
prosecute criminals.

Several speakers warned that the cameras in Washington Square Park had
already set a dangerous precedent.

"Once you give them the O.K. to do this, they will take it and run with it,"
warned Tonya D. McClary, director of research at the NAACP Legal Defense and
Educational Fund Inc. "We've pretty much allowed them a green light to put
these cameras in parks, in public schools, in the subway system and in city
buses. Soon, none of us will have a place where we can sit back and be
ourselves."

In the last month, several speakers said, the neighborhood drug peddlers
have simply moved out of range of the cameras, to West Third Street. Safir,
contemplating that kind of shift, promised last month that the police would
"be there when the traffickers go to adjacent areas."

To some, that heightened concerns about the limits of the new policy. "Are
we going to put surveillance cameras on every pole in this city?" asked
Michael Rosano of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project.
"Remove the cameras. We live in a democracy. We do not live under Giuliani's
police state."

Rosano worried aloud that the police might next decide to install cameras
along the Greenwich Village piers, long a cruising area for gay men. But he
said that even in Washington Square, the cameras could inhibit many closeted
homosexuals from expressing themselves freely, even by merely holding hands,
for fear "that the tapes would get into the wrong hands."

Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union,
which organized the rally, said that left unchecked, a citywide network of
police cameras raised the specter of government's "creating a video database
of the free movement of lawful New Yorkers."

He said that at a minimum, the city should require that videotapes made with
the surveillance cameras be destroyed after 72 hours if they do not reveal
criminal activity.

Deputy Inspector Michael Collins, a police spokesman, said the videotapes
from Washington Square Park are held for seven days before being erased,
because crimes are often reported a few days after they occur. He said the
police had already used the cameras in the park successfully at least twice
- -- once "live," when an officer watching the monitor saw a crime occurring
and radioed the police to make an arrest, and once on tape, as evidence
against a suspect already under arrest.

At the rally's end, a few Greenwich Village residents showed up to support
the surveillance cameras. Among them was Diane Whelton, who said she and
members of several neighborhood groups had been pleading for the cameras for
years.

The Rev. Peter Laarman, senior minister of Judson Memorial Church, on
Washington Square South, told her that he had been asked to allow a camera
to be installed on the church's spire, overlooking the park. But he told
Mrs. Whelton, "We didn't want to be a party to that level of ---- "

"Of the safety of people on the street," she said, interrupting him, "who
might not know that there's somebody coming up behind them?"

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company