I've been a frequent visitor to Minneapolis now since 2000, usually to see bands that seldom cross the border into Manitoba.
However, it was on this assignment to look at the city's police surveillance camera system that I realized how much Minneapolis has transformed itself over the last seven years, especially downtown, which used to be an intimidating place.
Lt. Jeff Rugel of the Minneapolis Police gives a demonstration of how North Minneapolis’s 38 police surveillance cameras work.
The streets and sidewalks gleam, they're so clean. Along pedestrian-friendly and well-lit Nicollet Mall, now an unsullied artery through what used to seem like an intimidating area, I was hard-pressed to find a discarded cigarette butt or litter of any kind.
One of the few vagrants I saw in the area made the deliberate gesture of stepping right up to the street to spit.
I wondered where the people were.
As it turns out, wintertime life in downtown Minneapolis is lived indoors - people here are able to walk the length of the entire downtown core by a series of second-floor skyways, which were packed with not only pedestrians, but burly security guards and what seem like hundreds of security cameras discreetly embedded in ceilings.
There's very little crime in the skyways, I'm told.
It was retail giant Target, headquartered in the city's downtown, that stepped forward in 2004 to offer police $250,000 to hang security cameras around Nicollet Mall, once an area known for robberies and drug trafficking.
The cash-strapped Minneapolis Police Department took Target up on its offer, asked people living in the nearby Loring Park neighbourhood to air their concerns over privacy, hung the cameras up and watched crime drop.
It's tempting to say the transformation of downtown Minneapolis is because of the cameras, but that's not how Deputy Chief Robert Allen sees it - he'd rather say it's a combination of forces working together.
"It's a very hard thing to say cameras reduce crime; my gut feeling is that they do," the straight-shooting officer tells me in an interview at his slightly scruffy downtown office.
Allen talks about other successes, like how after more cameras went up south of the city centre, a 15-year entrenched narcotics problem along Bloomington Avenue disappeared virtually overnight.
Again, however, Allen says the cameras were only a part of the equation, allowing police to nab drug dealers as they moved up a block or two to avoid the camera's gaze.
"Technology doesn't replace the need for cops," he says.
"In fact, to a degree, it can be more labour-intensive, because you're seeing more, you want to respond more."
That's where Minneapolis police find themselves today - with a whole lot of cameras and not enough eyes to watch them all.
The next step is to build an emergency operations centre where the camera feeds can be monitored more closely.
The cost being bandied about to build such a centre is $12 million.
Another problem Allen says the department is running into could be best described as "camera envy."
"Part of the problem I think now ... is actually restricting the number that you add because everybody wants them," he said, pointing to a map of a sleepy and wealthy Minneapolis suburb - a "high-buck" area as Allen calls it.
"Nothing happens there," he says.
Staff from the mayor's office in Winnipeg seem to have a sense of camera envy as well -- on the side table in Allen's office is a commemorative plaque and set of stainless-steel coasters embossed with our city's name.
It was a gift, Allen says, from Brian Gray, the manager of city hall's executive policy committee secretariat, following his recent visit to Minneapolis. Winnipeg's surveillance cameras could be in place by 2009.
Where once I might have thought the main issue about surveillance cameras was privacy concerns, it's really about where the crime goes after the cameras are switched on.
"The reality is, in Minneapolis, a number of our suburban communities have seen an increase in the activities (like drug-dealing, robberies and auto theft) that we've pushed out of the city. You push crime out to one area and then you help somebody else push it out further," Allen says.
The benefit, Allen says, is how this allows police forces the chance to share information, and crush emerging crime before it takes hold of an area.
"You can destroy crime - it's not automatically going to go someplace else," he says.
The deputy chief tells me that along with the downtown cameras, efforts to work more closely with private security and business have been showing results as well.
It's part of what officials call the SafeZone initiative, which promotes co-operation between downtown business, security guards, police, and city attorneys to aggressively cull livability offenses like littering, spitting and public urination in the interest of increasing public safety.
It started in Dec. 2004, months after the first cameras went up near Nicollet Mall.
There are a lot more hired security guards than there are police in the downtown - reports peg the ratio at 13 private guards for every police officer.
Security guards are now able to write reports that go directly to the city attorney's office without police involvement, and there's also a radio link allowing police and private security to communicate directly.
In the future, Allen predicts private security will be able to "push" their in-house camera footage directly to laptops in police cars that respond to service calls downtown.
"We're close to that," he says.
With Winnipeg on the cusp of setting up its own camera strategy (police are soon expected to issue a report outlining their use in downtown) our own city may be closing in on something similar.
PREVIOUS
