Occupy Wall Street Latest Target of Controversial NYPD Surveillance Units

As of Wednesday afternoon, two SkyWatch units were posted in the immediate vicinity of Zuccotti -- one at the intersection of Liberty Street and Trinity Place, directly across from the park's northeast corner, and another two blocks away at the intersection of Greenwich Street and Albany Street.

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Protester Mark Webb had been living with the Occupy Wall Street movement at Zuccotti Park for about five weeks as of Wednesday, and he said the SkyWatch units have become a disconcerting part of life for the occupiers. He and many of his fellow protesters worry that the units are being used for "Big Brother"-style surveillance.

"They went up after we marched on Wall Street a month ago and it was a pretty rowdy march," he said, while sitting in the heart of the park smoking a cigarette. "I don't see any reason why they would need to have the cherry-pickers other than to electronically monitor us. They can control and contain the crowd just with street cops. They can walk through here at any point, so I don't see why it's needed."

Each unit includes a boxy, climate-controlled pod affixed to the end of a collapsible hydraulic arm that can raise it more than 25 feet above the street, where one officer assisted by a spotlight and four rotating video cameras can spot crime as it occurs, according to Virginia-based ICX Technologies, which builds them.

SkyWatch units are built on wheeled platforms so the machines, which weigh in at nearly four tons and cost upwards of $90,000 each, can be easily towed between locations.

Keeping Crime Low From High Above Brooklyn

For the first half of 2010, vicious crime plagued the corner of Franklin Avenue and Lincoln Place in Crown Heights, an intersection that  a NYPD flatfoot walking the beat there last December called "one of the worst spots in Brooklyn."

Two attackers stabbed Shaquina Grant, 15, and slashed 16-year-old Shantayah Lewis's face during a brazen early-evening attack on March 19, 2010, police said, over what Lewis's relatives described as a drug beef involving her cousin.

Ronald Glover, 34, was shot in the head over drugs at about 11 a.m. May 19 last year in one of at least four shootings within a couple blocks of the corner in the first seven months of 2010, according to police.

The NYPD responded in August 2009 as it often does in its high-crime "impact zone" neighborhoods by posting a mobile SkyWatch unit in front of the intersection's 788 Grocery Store.