The camera cops(2)

Detailed work

Spotting criminal activity or finding a wanted person by watching a screen all day is not easy. The police chosen for this have to concentrate for long periods and watch for details.

"Early one morning we watched two young men stop their scooter and get off it. They walked to the left and disappeared from the camera's view but I knew there was a hotel on that side. It seemed strange for two young men to check into a hotel at that hour but they appeared again soon afterwards. They had not gone into the hotel but stayed by the side of the street. They seemed to be interested in the scooters parked close by and then they took one across the street where it was dark and we could not see them clearly. We thought they might have been breaking the lock or stealing the battery. When they came back into view one of the men was riding the scooter and the other got back on the scooter they arrived on. We sent police down there very quickly and the two were arrested," Gu said.

Back at the station when they were interviewed the two young men denied theft. They were told they had been seen on a security camera but still insisted they were innocent and that it had been another pair. They argued that they had found the clothes seen on the thieves in the street and just put them on. They said it was not them in the pictures.

"One of my colleagues was looking carefully at the video and noticed that one of the suspects had a slight limp. One of the arrested men had exactly the same limp. When we showed them this they eventually confessed," he said.

In another case it was an eagle-eyed observer that noticed a key piece of evidence, Gu said. "The camera was looking over people near a metro station entrance one evening. A young couple was cuddling with the girl sitting on the boy. We would not have worried about this, but we saw a backpack beside them. Then one of us recognized that the girl was wearing the uniform of a local junior middle school."

In China the age of consent is 14. "We knew that this girl could be no older than 15 if she went to a junior middle school. We watched them for a while and we were sure that sex had taken place."

When the police found the young couple and took them to the station, they discovered the girl was 13 years old and the man was 21. They had been previously reported for similar misbehavior at a park in Yangpu district. The young man was charged with seduction and the statutory rape of a juvenile.

Drug and sex crimes

Security cameras are very efficient in cracking down on street crimes without alerting suspects. Drug and sex trades on the street are monitored by the police at a distance.

A bike rider at the intersection of Wanhangdu Road and Kangding Road in Jing'an district caught the eye of a watcher. The cyclist was looking up and down the street but made no effort to cross.

"He looked like a thief we had been trying to catch so we sent some police but told them not to get too close to the man," officer Yue Zengli from the Caojiadu Police Station, who was in charge of the case, explained.

They watched the cyclist make a phone call and then, a few minutes later, saw a man walking dog. This man approached the cyclist after a while, as if he was unsure about him.

"They walked together for a short time and the police saw something being handed over. It was quickly done and the men separated and went in different directions. The police had been watching a drug deal," Yue said.

The waiting police officers quickly rounded up the men and found the cyclist had a substantial amount of illegal drugs on him.

"The advantage of the security cameras in this case was that they provided solid evidence and when confronted with this the two confessed quickly," Wang Ren, a senior officer at Caojiadu Police Station, said.

As well as looking out for drug deals the police use the cameras to monitor prostitution. One of the areas they keep a close eye on are the many entertainment venues around the Golden Magnolia Plaza in Huangpu district.

Officer Qin Ping from the Dapuqiao Police Station said they watched a woman one evening visiting one hotel after another. The police cameras followed her and watched her talk to a man who had been waiting beside a car. He seemed to be giving her orders and he made some phone calls.

"Then our cameras followed the woman who walked to a nearby street and went to a car where a man in black clothes got out and handed her a small packet. When we zoomed in with our camera we saw that she had been given condoms," Qin said.

The police watched the woman and the man go into an apartment and recorded the woman coming out several hours later. She and the first man were arrested and charged with prostitution and procuring.

"Criminals are stunned when they are arrested by the police in these camera cases. They have not seen any police around them or following them. They never expect to be arrested so quickly," said officer Zhou Lianyun, from Dapuqiao Police Station.