POLICE WORK VS. PRIVACY

Where should society draw the line between your right to privacy and the
prerogative of the police to butt into your affairs to maintain law and
order? Two recent developments - one local, the other national - raise that
question.

Milwaukee police have announced they are weighing putting cameras on
streets to monitor activity in high-crime neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the
nation's top court has ruled that, in the course of a routine traffic stop,
the police may sic a drug-sniffing dog on your car, so long as they're
quick about it.

Surveillance cameras in public places are, by now, a fact of life we may as
well get used to. But law-abiding motorists shouldn't have to get used to
police canines sniffing at their cars, as they might under the Supreme
Court's unfortunate ruling.

To judge from some on-the-street commentary, some residents think that
police surveillance cameras would invade their privacy (while others
support the idea). The only trouble with that notion is that you shouldn't
have an expectation of privacy in public. Private surveillance cameras
inside and outside stores already abound - and for good reason: to combat
crime.

The police, whose mission is to combat crime, may as well get in on the
act. The relevant question is how effective such monitoring is. Other
cities have resorted to surveillance cameras, and a few have abandoned
them, finding them not to be worth the effort.

But if Milwaukee police determine that cameras help in fighting crime,
qualms about personal privacy need not deter them. Still, the police should
monitor these monitors - in part to make doubly sure they don't infringe on
privacy.

Police, however, should hesitate to have dogs sniff out drugs in cars on
the highway without any reasonable suspicion the vehicles are carrying
narcotics, despite the Supreme Court's stamp of approval on the practice.

The court reasoned that, as long as police don't unduly detain a motorist
to wait for a narcotics-detecting dog, the practice is constitutional,
overturning an Illinois Supreme Court ruling to the contrary. Central to
the high court's reasoning was that the dogs only sniffed out drugs, which
are illegal to possess, and thus wouldn't have police rummaging through the
private belongings of innocent people.

But Justice David Souter noted in a dissenting opinion that the dogs do
have high error rates and thus could subject the cars of innocent people to
searches. And noting that the dogs can be intimidating, Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg rightly warned: "Under today's decision, every traffic stop could
become an occasion to call in the dogs, to the distress and embarrassment
of the law-abiding population."

Surveillance cameras in public places - yes. Dogs sniffing drugs in cars
without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing - no.