Video cameras increasingly vital for police
ALLENTOWN, Pa. — These days, the public eye never blinks. Surveillance cameras see you banking. They see you shopping. They even see you raking your leaves, thanks to your neighbor’s video doorbell.
If you commit a crime, they may well see that, too.
Cameras — installed in homes or businesses or on car dashboards — have become one of the most essential tools in the criminal investigator’s kit. They don’t always capture crimes as they happen, but video footage can be stitched together into a time-stamped map of a suspect’s movements.
This was vividly demonstrated in the investigation of the University of Idaho slayings. One of the foundations of the case against Bryan Kohberger, the Poconos native and DeSales University graduate charged with four counts of first-degree murder, is a lengthy video trail of his car on the night of the crime.
Closer to home, cameras were essential to the prosecution of Drew Rose. In 2019, the Bethlehem man killed 97-year-old Palmer Township resident Virginia Houck and her son, Roger, in a robbery scheme, then burned their house down to conceal evidence.
Rose, arrested after a seven-month investigation, pleaded guilty to the killings. Northampton County District Attorney Terry Houck — he is not related to the victims — said a damning video timeline was one reason why.
“We had his whole route tracked from his residence to the scene and back from the scene to his residence,” Houck said. “We used Ring (video doorbells), highway cameras, ATM machines, cameras outside stores.”
Video camera surveillance “has become extremely important to law enforcement and extremely useful to investigations,” said Adam Scott Wandt, a cybersecurity and investigations expert and assistant professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Wandt said surveillance has undergone three revolutions, beginning with governments installing security cameras in public areas and monitoring real-time footage. One of the cities to pioneer the practice was London, England, where 9.3 million people are under observation by more than 600,000 closed-circuit cameras.
“That spread to the U.S. and major cities like New York and L.A. where real-time crime centers started to pop up,” Wandt said. “Then eventually they figured out, well, there are tens of thousands of commercial establishments like banks and drug stores and parking lots and they monitor their own activities. You saw (law enforcement) going out and doing public-private partnerships to get access to those live feeds.”
The third wave is the advent of doorbell cameras and other types of home security cameras. They’ve added millions of electronic witnesses to the nation’s streets.
Wandt sees a fourth wave coming.
“Autonomous cars out there now,” he said. “They record what’s around them 24-7. Law enforcement is thinking, can we take advantage of these cameras on cars?”
How video footage helped police identify Kohberger
In the early days of surveillance, investigators would review grainy black-and-white footage in hopes of finding a few frames showing the bad guy’s face, or maybe a tattoo. Many of today’s cameras offer sharp color images that can pick up scars, clothing logos, license plates and other details.
Video is so vital that some big-city police departments have units entirely dedicated to it.
“The (New York Police Department) for example, their homicide squad has a specially trained unit whose only job is to find video evidence,” Wandt said. “It’s gone from, ‘Hey, let’s get some footage from the bank robbery,’ to ‘Hey, I’m a police officer and it’s my entire job.’”
In the Idaho case, investigators said they identified Kohberger as a suspect through a “video canvas” — an examination of footage from businesses and homes in and around Moscow, the college town where Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle were slain in their off-campus home.
The cameras showed a white Hyundai Elantra passing the crime scene three times in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, and speeding away moments after the murders are believed to have occurred. But that wasn’t the only place where the Hyundai appeared. It could be seen leaving town on a road that leads across the border to Washington State University, where Kohberger was pursuing a doctorate in criminology.
Cameras at Washington State showed the car leaving the campus and heading toward Moscow a little more than an hour before the killings and returning about an hour after. Once Kohberger was identified as the owner, he was placed under surveillance that ended with his Dec. 30 arrest at his parents’ Chestnuthill Township home.
The car was only part of the evidence cited in the arrest affidavit. Police said he was also linked to the crime by DNA found on a leather knife sheath found on a bed next to one of the victims, and by activity from his cell phone in the vicinity of the house. Police also used video surveillance evidence to corroborate the cellphone data, noting that Kohberger, or his car, were seen at the times and places indicated in the phone logs.
Security-conscious homeowners sometimes become part of police investigations. The Washington Post reported that police requested home footage 20,000 times in 2020.
Northampton’s Houck said most homeowners are happy to help, though business owners sometimes require subpoenas before turning over footage. That can stem from corporate policy or an owner’s reluctance for the public to know that a crime occurred inside or outside the business.
In some cases, homeowners have helped police without knowing it. Amazon acknowledged last year that it has sometimes given police warrantless “emergency” access to Ring footage that captured images pertinent to major investigations. Amazon acquired the video doorbell maker in 2018.
Wandt said police will likely the get the footage one way or another. In an important enough case, they’ll obtain a warrant.
“Prosecutors have become very accustomed to this evidence and when homicides and large crimes happen, they expect this kind of evidence to be provided,” he said.
It can be invaluable at trial.
“One of the worst types of evidence is eyewitness evidence,” Wandt said. “It’s extremely unreliable. When you have somebody who is reputable sitting as a witness saying to a jury, ‘That’s the person who did it,’ we know that’s one of the most unreliable types of evidence, but it’s really powerful for a jury to hear someone they trust say that.”
Video camera footage “levels the playing field,” he said. “It lets the jury make up their minds because it makes the jury into witnesses themselves.”
It can also improve witness credibility, according to Houck.
“If a witness says ‘I heard three shots, then a delay, then two more’ — if that’s confirmed, then you know you have a credible witness,” he said.
Risk and reward: Video camera footage in Lehigh Valley cases
Surveillance has long been at the center of the conversation over protecting people while protecting privacy. While there is no legal expectation of privacy in public areas, it’s unnerving to know so many cameras are capturing every movement.
“You literally are on video most of the time when you’re outside,” Houck said.
Without video, however, some cases might never be solved.
Lehigh County District Attorney Jim Martin recalled the case of a murdered woman whose body was found off the Summit Hill exit of Interstate 78. The victim’s cellphone, discovered on the highway, provided a record of her movements, including a period of time on Lehigh Street.
“Through the use of city cameras, we were able to capture the defendant’s vehicle with the two of them together in the hours before the (homicide) occurred,” Martin said. “It was good police work.”
The case ended with a conviction of first-degree murder.
In another case, cameras allowed Allentown police to exonerate themselves of an accusation from a lawyer who claimed they were targeting his client and tailed his client for a long time before an encounter that led to the man’s arrest. A thread of videos from city cameras showed police were behind the defendant’s car only briefly.
“We’ve used it to our benefit and we’ve used it to catch people,” Martin said.
Criminals, however, have used cameras to their benefit as well. Wandt cited a 2021 Florida case in which a suspected child predator used a Ring camera to monitor a group of FBI agents coming to serve a warrant. He fired rounds from an AR-15 rifle through the door, killing two agents and wounding three others.
By and large, however, cameras are a net good, Wandt said. They can discourage criminal activity, lead police to offenders and exonerate the wrongly accused.
Apart from home and business cameras, virtually everyone has a video-equipped cell phone, and police have dashboard cameras and body cameras to record their encounters. Such police cameras captured two instances in which Kohberger was pulled over in Indiana during a cross-country trip home to Pennsylvania with his father.
“Video footage protects people,” Wandt said.
Morning Call reporter Daniel Patrick Sheehan can be reached at (610) 820-6598 or dsheehan@mcall.com.
