Pubdate: Wed, 24 Apr 2002
Source: Press Democrat, The (CA)
Copyright: 2002 The Press Democrat
Contact:  http://www.pressdemo.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/348
Author: Jeremy Hay, The Press Democrat

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.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens