The first time I saw them, I was with my wife coming back from an evening in Oak Park. We’d taken the most direct route back to our place, which was along Chicago Avenue.

Chicago Ave. runs east-west toward the city. On the way, it passses through some of the worst areas in Chicago. People always think of the gritty, working-class South Side, but in reality, many of the worst areas are on the West Side.

The route takes you directly through a heavily impoverished area where the church/liquor store ratio nearly 1:1, and we stopped counting the churches at a dozen. All of the buildings have gates and bars or are boarded up. People mill about outside the liquor stores and don’t seem to have anywhere to go.

As we drove back toward our home, we noticed something very curious: the blue lights. For several blocks, in the heart of the worst area, there are these curious, flashing blue lights sitting atop boxes mounted on the lamp posts.

While the blue light on the top of the box flashes away, in a small, black orb at the bottom of the box, there sits a video camera, which may or may not be panning, tilting, and zooming in on the action in the street below. These boxes house survailance cameras used by the Chicago Police Departement to monitor the neighborhood.

Blink. Blink. Blink. They never stop. Somewhere, on the other end, a CPD officer watches the scene, noting suspicious activity and sending out squad cars if necessary. All the while, the people on the street seem oblivious to their presence. They still stand in doorways of buildings, glancing nervously around. They mill about outside the liquor stores, hanging on cars that slowly cruise around the block all night. The cameras don’t seem to impact their lives at all, one way or the other.

Or do they? I have no idea what it must be like to live around there. Life under the watching eye of the CPD all the time probably doesn’t register much compared to the other obvious hardships of life on that stretch of Chicago Ave. But then again, maybe it does. What is the effect on a person when they seek something higher, cast their gaze toward the heavens to escape, if only for a moment, only to find that someone is always looking down on them.

[A Chicago Story via DefenseTech.org]
[Spycam Force via WIRED]