PETALUMA TURNS UP THE HEAT

Police gain thermal imaging camera with government grant.

Petaluma police buttressed their crime-fighting arsenal with a heat-seeking
surveillance camera, which they unveiled Tuesday.

Police say it will help in drug investigations, searches and other cases
but civil liberties advocates say the device is a form of high-tech snoopery.

The $22,000 hand-held thermal imager, which resembles a large video camera,
detects patterns of heat. It's a version of the infrared technology U.S.
military forces have used to search for Taliban and al-Qaida fighters in
Afghanistan's mountain cave complexes.

"Its uses are almost endless and they're still coming up with more," said
Petaluma Police Detective Martin Frye, who leads the department's training
program for the new device.

Most commonly used at night, thermal imagers are powerful enough to pick
out a human in the dark at a distance approaching half a mile.

Frye said it can also detect clues important to a police pursuit or
investigation such as the heat left by a hand on a window, or from a body
that had been leaning until moments before on a lamppost.

Petaluma bought its thermal imager with a grant from the Counterdrug
Technology Assessment Center of the Office of National Drug Policy.

Law enforcement officials say thermal imagers have proven invaluable in
searching for prowlers or fleeing suspects, as well as for locating missing
people when time is of the essence.

But a U.S. Supreme Court ruling has limited certain uses of such devices
without a search warrant. Critics say even with that safeguard they
represent too great a risk to privacy.

"This is just outrageous," said Steve Fabian, a Sonoma County deputy public
defender and co-chairman of the local American Civil Liberties Union chapter.

"They're just trying to get more and more sophisticated ways of getting
into people's homes," Fabian said.

The manufacturers and police say critics are overstating the capabilities
of the device, which works by detecting differences in surface heat.

"They're not magic," said Janet Kopec, spokeswoman for Raytheon Technical
Services Company, which made Petaluma's imager.

"You can't see through walls and it's not X-ray vision," said Rohnert Park
Police Sgt. Don Wagner, whose city will get its own thermal imager next
year, also using a federal grant.

The Supreme Court's ruling in June said federal agents improperly used a
thermal imager to detect heat emanating from the house of a suspected pot
grower in Oregon.

The court said using the device without a warrant violated the Fourth
Amendment right against unlawful search and seizure.

Frye said the Law Enforcement Thermographers Association -- which trains
police departments on the camera -- believes that witnesses in the Oregon
case inaccurately described what the device "saw," and "they're waiting for
another good case to come through to challenge that ruling."

As it stands, he said, "we have to obtain a search warrant before we can
infrared someone's home or the surrounding area."

Additional warrants are required for police to actually enter a home.

Other buildings open to the public, though, including businesses, are fair
game, he said.

Petaluma's thermal imager is the third in the county. Similar devices are
used on the sheriff's helicopter, and by the Sonoma County Narcotics Task
Force, which uses it mostly for marijuana investigations.

"It's just another tool to add to other investigative techniques," said
Kent Shaw, commanding officer of the narcotics task force.

"It's a very slippery slope ... the reality is it's a search," said Fabian,
who called the thermal imager "an expensive toy."

News researcher Vonnie Matthews contributed to this report.