Looks like more camera surveillence is striping away constitutional rights to deal crack!
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2006-04-03T152029Z_01_N31349215_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-NEWJERSEY.xml&rpc=22EAST ORANGE, New Jersey (Reuters) - Lenox Avenue in suburban East Orange was long a hotbed of drugs and gun mayhem and one of New Jersey's toughest streets. But Big Brother has cleaned it up.
Police here say that thanks to new technology there has not been a single violent crime in almost a year on a street where the notorious Bloods gang sold $10 hits of crack cocaine and drive-by shootings were once commonplace.
Now high-tech cameras and gunshot sensors are mounted at each end of Lenox Avenue, and on many other East Orange streets. The residential avenue of mainly multifamily homes is blocked from traffic and, with the exception of the 24-hour police presence, it looks as tranquil as most New Jersey suburbs.
"There's no drug dealers or nothing here. They all left," said Andre Davis, 15, riding his scooter on Lenox. "There's no gang bangers, no drugs. The cops done a good job."The effort is part of a push to reverse a trend which saw the town -- once a middle-class suburb of executives who took a 30-minute train ride to Manhattan -- reverse a decline sparked by the deadly 1967 race riots in neighboring Newark, which gradually transformed the town into a slum populated almost entirely by lower-income blacks.
"This was once a very prominent city and a very safe place to live," said East Orange Police Director Jose Cordero of the town of about 70,000 people, whose Central Avenue was once called "the Fifth Avenue of New Jersey."
More recently, Cordero said, "People were fearful of not being able to walk their streets."
The veteran New York City police officer took the top job here in 2004 and says homicides dropped to a 25-year low of 14 in 2005, down from 22 in 2003. Overall crime is at a 20-year low.
Last summer, police installed cameras in crime-ridden neighborhoods and on the city's commercial center, each equipped with sensors that can detect the sound of gunfire. Police use the cameras to zoom in on certain streets and virtually "walk" down the pavements looking for crime.
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In what local cops call "The Brain Room," a half-a-dozen officers monitor large flat-screen televisions showing street activity. And a "Virtual Community Patrol" allows residents to view panoramic still pictures of their block and report crimes to police using their home computers. Continued ...