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Law Enforcement:
Stunning New Technology

Saturday, December 29, 2001

New police tools peer through the dark, but have some wary

By MICHAEL GIUSTI | News-Journal Staff Writer

ORMOND BEACH — In the dark of night, the driver was nowhere to be found.

Flagler County deputies and Bunnell police officers chased the station wagon for nearly half an hour down U.S. 1 and watched helplessly as the car went out of control at Nova Road. The driver ditched the car and ran into the woods, completely shrouded in the darkness.

The man deputies suspected was driving the car early Nov. 23, Danny Garnett, was wanted on several felony warrants and had disappeared into the scrub palms and pine trees, completely out of sight of the naked eye.

Within minutes, a Volusia County sheriff's helicopter began scanning the woods with a camera designed to pick up heat differences of less than 1 degree.

Huddling near a bush, several hundred feet into the woods, was a bright spot on the camera's scope.

The suspect was found.

Without a glimmer of light, Garnett showed up clear as day on the dash-mounted scope inside Air One. The helicopter-mounted camera, called FLIR, for forward-looking infrared device, represents an increasingly popular line of policing tools that let officers see a person, even if he or she can't see them.

To law enforcement officers, tools like the thermal-imaging cameras and night-vision goggles are godsends, giving them another needed advantage over suspects, helping officers do their job faster and more efficiently.

At the same time, civil libertarians see the vision-enhancing devices as potential invasions of privacy, offering officers intrusively enhanced vision that usurps Fourth Amendment protections.

"FLIR makes our jobs easy," said Volusia County sheriff's Air One pilot Cpl. Mark Patterson. "When all the components are in place between a good perimeter, K-9 units on the ground and a quick response, catching the bad guy is virtually a done deal with FLIR."

Catching people who run from police with the airborne camera, like deputies were able to do with Garnett, has become almost routine, said sheriff's Sgt. Danna White.

The Volusia sheriff's aviation team has urged local law enforcement agencies to give it a call and ask for airborne help in cases ranging from fleeing suspects to missing boaters, even elderly people wandering off.

For the most part, the courts and public have accepted vision-enhancing tools as long as they are limited to public places.

"Once you leave your home and go into the public space, the existing case law says that police can use basically anything they want to watch you," said Tim Lynch, director of the Project on Criminal Justice with the Cato Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., that advocates individual freedoms and limited government.

It is the specter of that equipment being used to peer into the privacy of people's homes that chills Lynch's blood and raises the most public concern.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that for police to use image-enhancing and thermal-imaging equipment to watch someone in a private residence, a judge must first issue a search warrant.

In Ponce Inlet, police use hand-held night-vision scopes to scan the beach.

"Ponce used to be a party destination. Local kids used to come down here in groups to hang out on the beach and often they were drinking and doing drugs," said Ponce Inlet Sgt. Alan White. "By the time we could see them, they were long gone."

Beach walker Ann Teschner said last week what many people on the beach have been saying recently.

"Actually it is kind of nice to know that someone is out here watching out for me," the 56-year-old Ponce Inlet resident said.

"We have a lot of people come down at night to fish and look for shells," White said. "With these, we can look out for them while making sure other people aren't causing trouble."

Unlike the helicopter-mounted camera, the hand-held scope projects an invisible light and magnifies the visible ambient light to let officers see more than 100 yards into the darkness.

The helicopter's infrared camera does not project anything; rather it registers the heat radiating off bodies, cars, trees and the ground to paint a picture. Neither device offers Superman-like X-ray vision, though.

"This is not like the movies. We can't see through a wall or into a house," Patterson said. "We are not looking to peer into people's lives. FLIR is just another tool that lets us do our job more efficiently."

Despite the lack of public outcry, Lynch said authorities should tread carefully when approaching technology that offers a visual advantage.

"This is such a slippery slope," he said. "Even if everything is on the up and up, there is just so much room for abuse."

Naysayers and skeptics aside, Patterson and White both stress they are not out to spy on people just protect them.

"We see our job as getting the bad guys, and that can be real rewarding," Patterson said. "It is fun for me, just like the other guys, but we are always careful to use these tools responsibly and to respect the public's privacy."

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