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Shopping Centers Today -> April 2002
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BIG BROTHER?
High-tech gadgetry guards the United Kingdom’s Bluewater.
Will the United States get it next?
By Dave Bodamer
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Drive into the Bluewater mall outside London in a stolen car, and you’re in big trouble.
An automated license-plate-recognition camera system connected to a police database will alert security before you’ve even found your parking space. And security at Bluewater, Europe’s largest mall, happens to be the police — the mall opted to pay to have on-duty officers patrol the center rather than use a private company.
In January alone, when the system was installed, eight people were arrested, all of them suspected of committing crimes elsewhere. Two of the suspects had driven into the center in stolen cars, and the other six were driving vehicles linked to other crimes.
The technology did not cause much of a stir among civil libertarians in Britain, which has endured a long and destructive campaign by Irish nationalists.
“There’s no issue with civil liberties,” said Rachael Nolan, a spokeswoman for Bluewater, adding that no customers or civil liberties groups have complained since Bluewater put the system in place. “None of the plate numbers are recorded. The system scans it and reads it, but it does not retain that information.”
Neither do the British object to cameras. The country’s largest retail federation, the British Retail Consortium, advocates the use of closed-circuit systems by its members. Bluewater alone has 360 cameras throughout the complex. Shopping centers in Israel go a step further, searching the bags and cars of customers entering the properties.
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ICSC Shopping Center
Security Conference Baltimore, April 14-16 |
While such measures are unlikely to get such a smooth ride at shopping centers in the United States, security and surveillance have increased markedly since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In early February Washington, D.C., announced that it was installing a camera network to monitor the entire city, and several major airports have said they are considering facial-recognition technologies, which, as the name suggests, can automatically pick a criminal out from a crowd.
Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union, doesn’t like it.
“One solution that is under consideration at a number of airports is to conduct widespread video surveillance of airport patrons and to use face-recognition technology in an effort to check the identity of passengers,” Steinhardt said. “But it is abundantly clear that the security benefits of such an approach would be minimal to nonexistent.”
There was a similar outcry last year when it was revealed that police in Tampa, Fla., had used facial-recognition technology on fans attending the 2001 Super Bowl.
The system accurately identified 19 people in the crowd with outstanding warrants, although none were arrested at the game. Tampa has since installed the system and 36 cameras in the Centro Ybor City entertainment district, one of the city’s nightly hot spots. In the United States, facial-recognition software has also been used by the Virginia Beach, Va., police; at large casinos; and at some high-security federal facilities.
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| The license plates of all cars entering Bluewater are automatically scanned and processed by a police computer database. |
No system similar to Bluewater’s is in place at U.S. malls, specialists say, but centers have taken steps to increase security that include the use of video cameras and other recording devices. At the Northland Center in Southfield, Mich., for example, officials have discussed whether to make delivery truck drivers identify themselves to video cameras before entering the tunnels that provide access to the shopping center’s tenants. Currently, the doors automatically open when a vehicle approaches the gate. The Pearl Street Mall, Boulder, Colo., like centers across the country, also has a surveillance system in place to help it catch vandals.
But although high-tech recognition systems are not in malls now, does their use in public places today mean they will be in centers tomorrow?
Though no U.S. shopping center has employed either license-plate or facial-recognition systems as of yet, a few might deploy them in the future, according to Donald Lantz, senior executive vice president of IPC International Corp., a Bannockburn, Ill.-based mall security provider.
“It would be a reach to say we’ll see wide use of these kinds of systems,” Lantz said. “The tendency in this country is to wait to see if something happens and then react. I think the question is how much shopping centers become targets. I don’t see that happening at this point.”
Lantz did say that he would not be surprised if some centers did look to those systems, but it is not something he is actively advocating.
“Some shopping center owners will avail themselves of modern technologies as time goes by. You see that with the automatic defibrillators right now,” he said. “But in this country there will be a backlash over wide use of these kinds of systems. In general, people in the United States value their privacy. There’s been backlash to surveillance systems that are for deterring shoplifting. You bet there will be backlash to facial-recognition [systems].”
In late October the U.S. military invited bids from private contractors for 38 surveillance systems, including facial-recognition technologies.
“The government is increasingly going to be conducting scans — facial scans, voice scans, data scans,” said James Dempsey, deputy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington D.C.-based civil liberties advocacy group. These will inevitably be in private hands in the future, he predicted.
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