SEEING IS BELIEVING IN CRIME-FIGHTING CAMERAS

If, as we suspect will come to pass, the apprehension of criminal suspects
through use of police cameras becomes commonplace in Chicago, Marcus D.
Jackson, the man arrested, police say, while smoking pot in a parked blue
Chevy Caprice, will go down in Chicago law enforcement history, along with
the first suspect nabbed through a fingerprint and the first fleeing felon
chased by a patrol car.

This is good. The popularity of action movies portraying grim futuristic
dystopias of surveillance and punishment should not make us biased against
the cameras.

We want a police force that is proactive, observant and smart, and the use
of these cameras strikes us as a fine way to make the most of limited
police resources.

Just as two officers in a squad car can cover more ground than two officers
walking the beat (though perhaps not always as effectively), so a bank of
cameras extends the eye of law enforcement. Jackson was not a free-thinking
member of a band of rebels--he is, police say, a drug dealer on parole, who
had no business smoking dope at 1:30 in the morning at Augusta and Pulaski.

Installing cameras to detect crime is simple.

If only there were a quick way to correct the deeply flawed mind-set
expressed by Jackson's mother, Susie, who denounced the arrest. "This isn't
fair,'' she said. "I don't see how they could arrest him for just sitting
there smoking weed. Most young people do that.''

They can arrest him because possession of marijuana is against the law. It
would reflect poorly on a choirboy, but when the accused is a convicted
felon, it suggests that perhaps he is not taking the opportunity for a
fresh start provided by his parole as seriously as he might.

And no matter how it might seem to those who share the mother's view, "most
young people'' are not smoking weed on the street at 1:30 a.m. They're
asleep, preparing for school and jobs and lives that deserve every form of
protection from the criminally inclined.