Smile for the camera, criminals

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A robbery in progress? Say cheese. Brandishing a firearm? Take a snapshot. Fleeing the scene of a crime? Capture a photo of the license plate and put it online or give it to police.

Smile, criminals: You're on candid camera phone.

Since the installation of cameras in cellular telephones, more ordinary citizens have been using their camera phones to dispense high-tech, low-cost justice.

"The appeal of camera phones is that people carry cell phones with them all the time," said Tony Henning, Mobile Imaging Analyst for the 6Sight Future of Imaging Conference, in Monterey, Calif. "A camera phone is a phone — and you don't leave your house without your phone."

In the past, the high-expense, low-quality camera phone was a poor substitute for regular cameras, used primarily for grainy portraits or documenting damage after fender benders. Now that higher-quality camera phones have become increasingly less expensive — with some given away with the purchase of a cellular phone plan — more than 257 million camera phones were shipped worldwide in 2004.

"That means that the opportunity to photograph things that you wouldn't automatically have thought about photographing or would have the chance to photograph has grown exponentially," Mr. Henning added, saying there will be more "people preventing crimes, providing evidence of crimes [and] exonerating people accused of crimes because they happened to have a camera phone with them at the right place at the right time."

Alan Reiter, president of Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing in Chevy Chase, said that because of wireless capabilities, "someone can see government abuse — [perhaps] it's an officer beating a suspect — if you have a camera phone, you can snap that photo or take a video and very quickly transmit that image around the world. ... You can't do that with a camera except if you have one of the very, very few digital cameras that have WiFi built in."

One of the first instances of camera-phone justice was in August 2003, when a 15-year-old boy from Clinton, N.J., took photos of a would-be kidnapper after being approached by the man and told to get into his car. These photos — which included the make of the assailant's vehicle and license plate — led to the arrest of 59-year-old bartender William MacDonald.

In Queens, N.Y., two Catholic schoolgirls made the cover of the New York Daily News in May 2005 when they snapped a picture of subway flasher Wilfredo Ponte, which led to his arrest. In April of the same year, photos stored in Orem, Utah, resident Jacabo Javier Rivera's cell phone led to his arrest in connection with child pornography and the sexual assault of at least two children.

Borderline vigilante groups include the Web site HollabackNYC.blogspot.com, which allows New York women to vent their frustrations and post camera-phone photos of men ranging from chauvinistic to vulgar.