A Camera Below a Grate? The Police Suspect a Peeper's Work
A video camera was found Tuesday underneath this grate on 88th Street near Lexington Avenue. The police said that it had apparently been placed to look up women's skirts, but that it had not functioned properly.
At first, it looked as if it might be a bomb. The truth, it turned out, was not as dangerous but was alarming nevertheless: someone had put a video camera below a street grate on the Upper East Side, apparently placed to look up the skirts of women walking past, the police said.
A passer-by spotted the camera on Tuesday on a shelf above a subway catwalk, about three feet below street level, rigged to a battery pack and pointed straight up on the south side of 88th Street just west of Lexington Avenue. After the passer-by called the police, the bomb squad arrived, and a technician dropped onto the catwalk, among cigarette butts, bottle caps and gum wrappers, to examine a camera connected to a digital video recorder, the police said.
Speaking to reporters in the Bronx, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said: "You wonder what goes through people's minds. I guess 'sick' is the only word that comes to mind."
Hidden cameras are a staple of Internet pornography sites, but a police spokesman, Lt. Eugene Whyte, said he did not know of a camera being used in a public space like a sidewalk before.
Because the grate is difficult to lift, the police were investigating the possibility that the camera had been placed from below, on the subway catwalk. There were no suspects yesterday, the police said.
The discovery repulsed women who live or work near the corner.
"It's disgusting. It's an invasion of a woman's privacy," said Johanna Roberts, 38, a real estate manager wearing a long denim skirt yesterday. "My God. That's horrible. I hope they find him. To me, it's a pervert. I guess I have to be a little more careful now walking on the street."
The device was not capable of transmitting live video, the police said. The department's Technical Assistance and Response Unit found that the camera had not recorded anything under the grate, because of faulty wiring or a loose battery.
"No images were captured showing anybody alighting above," Lieutenant Whyte said. The digital file stored in the recorder appeared to have been taken at a children's school recital, and was of poor quality, he said.
David Feldman, a spokesman for the company that made the recorder,
Caroline Altman, a 35-year-old musical theater performer, said she normally walked over the grate, unless she was wearing a skirt, as she was yesterday, and "afraid to do a Marilyn Monroe," she said.
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