News
in
Brief
9/3/99
Jane Tseng, [email protected] BCCLU Fights Spy-Cam in City Park The British Columbia Civil Liberties Union announced last Friday (8/27) that they were planning to ask the federal privacy commissioner to rule that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police acted improperly when they failed to warn the public about a security camera they installed in a park in downtown Kelowna, BC in July. Local police claim the camera led to the arrest of several suspected drug dealers before it fell victim to arsonists. BCCLU spokesman Dan Beyerstein told the Daily Courier that the privacy commissioner, which handles complaints against the RCMP, had no authority to prohibit the reinstallation of the camera, but that a ruling in the BCCLU's favor could be useful to defense attorneys. At a city council meeting last month, Kelowna Mayor Walter Gray defended the use of spy-cams, saying that "Security Cameras are now a way of life. If we can get four or five or six more of them, we will. So there." Web of Federal Anti-Crime Initiatives Along the Border Netting Small Fry The Houston Chronicle reports this week that the federal Southwest Border Initiatives, which took effect five years ago in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, have resulted in federal dockets being overloaded with cases against small-time drug dealers and people who cross the border illegally. In Texas alone last year, federal courts reported a 69% increase in drug prosecutions. Ron Woods, a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District in Texas, told the Chronicle that the reason for the shift in resources from prosecuting high-level traffickers to people caught dealing as little as half a pound of marijuana is partly because, "it's easier to do the smaller cases than to put 10 agents on a complicated case for a year." The increase in federal prosecution of drug and immigration crimes has also filled federal prisons to the point where some prisoners are now being housed in state prisons, at a cost to the federal government -- thus, to taxpayers -- of $650 million a year. "It's a numbers game," Woods said. "The administration likes to point to the number of indictments and say they're up. They're tough on crime."
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