Lacandis Williams wishes hidden cameras were rolling one night this month when, unseen and unheard, a thief broke into her boyfriend's car. With videotape, she said, police might have caught the culprit in the act.

"I think it'd be a lot safer" with surveillance cameras, Williams, 19, said. "Then (police) could just catch (criminals) on camera and bring them in right then and there."

Williams, who lives on Fisher Avenue, said she would welcome the 10 to 18 surveillance cameras police hope to station in her neighborhood and in other "hot spots" for crime by early spring.

The cameras are the first phase of a larger goal to one day watch the city's roughest areas from a bird's-eye view. Police officials hope the extra eyes will chase away drug dealers and head off violence.

But the surveillance is troubling to critics, who say the crime-fighting tool invites abuse and is an ineffective form of Big Brother government.

"It plays on a lot of the fears we have now about terrorism and crime and suggests that the only rational way we can deal with those problems is to somehow give up our personal freedom," said Ed Yohnka of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. "It's a misapplication of power."

'Starting from scratch'
Cameras already watch over parts of Fisher Avenue and State and Wyman streets.

The two are "test demos" police have used for nearly two years, moving them around the city to explore their capabilities. Officials deemed the cameras a success after On the Waterfront, when they surveilled massive crowds from above.

Installation of more security cameras raises questions about who will watch the footage and how long it will be stored. Rockford police say they don't yet have the answers.

"We're really starting from scratch," Deputy Police Chief Lori Sweeney said.

Rockford's cameras will be successful, she said, if calls for service decrease in monitored areas, more crimes are solved, police officers deem them helpful and residents say they feel safer.

"There's still a tremendous amount of work we have to do," she said.

The Police Department has $300,000 to spend on the camera technology, money from a Crime Stoppers grant the department won in May. The cameras will be perched throughout two stretches of the city where police have recently unleashed an aggressive anti-drug strategy.

On the east side, they'll be in an area from the Rock River to Kishwaukee Street and from 15th Avenue to Walnut Street. On the west side, they’ll be in an area surrounded by Jefferson Street on the south, Whitman Street on the north, Kilburn Avenue on the west and the Rock River on the east.

That could mean surveillance near Betty Webster's Sixth Street home, where, she said, syringes and pills litter the street. She said she's grown tired of hiding from drug peddlers and hoodlums. In November, police reported 27 drug-related incidents and one incident of shots fired in the area.

Webster said she supports the use of cameras.

"Anything is a plus, the crime has gotten so bad," she said.

Based on Chicago plan
The new cameras will likely produce sharper images and their footage will be viewable from the Public Safety Building and on laptops in marked squad cars, Sweeney said. Night vision will allow a civilian or a retired officer to monitor the footage around the clock.

While the tape is rolling, officers will be able to zoom in tight enough to read a license plate, and they can rotate the cameras 360 degrees. Officials can deploy officers right away if they spot something suspicious or use footage as an investigative tool.

Rockford's strategy is patterned on "Operation Disruption," a security plan Chicago police started in 2002. There are 632 cameras throughout Chicago, mostly in spots plagued by narcotics use, department spokesman Patrick Camden said. Chicago's cameras are visible, marked by blue strobe lights and packed into bulletproof cases.

The high-tech possibilities worry the ACLU's Yohnka.

"Suddenly, you're able to alter the direction of a camera so it's pointed at someone's home," he said. "It's easy to imagine someone looking into a second-story window and watching someone undress."

Officials recognize the possibility for abuse, Sweeney said, and want to guard against it. They say they're seeking a model that can be programmed to block certain areas from being filmed. If officials don't want footage of a bedroom window, for example, the technology allows them to create a border around it, said Darrell Erdman, the department's information systems technician.

"We don't want people to feel like we're going to be peeking into their homes," Sweeney said.

But civil libertarians say the problem is also about results. Few studies have been done in the United States that analyze whether surveillance cameras are responsible for a drop in crime, said Mike Fergus of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Authorities instead point to data collected in heavily-surveyed Great Britain, where residents are familiar with the cameras.

Camden said such data would be hard to collect in Chicago.

"That's like trying to quantify how many crimes do marked squad cars prevent," Camden said. "We have seen decreases in the amount of calls in neighborhoods where (cameras) have been installed."