In the wake of the murder of a New Orleans cabbie earlier this month, police are seeking to create a private-camera database for faster access to such footage.

Two days elapsed between the cabbie’s killing and police gaining access to private surveillance footage that identified the suspect.

The latest move is reviving the camera debate pitting public safety against privacy issues.

United Cab company driver Arvil Hicks III, 52, of Avondale, was shot several times and found dead in his cab the evening of May 23 in the Irish Channel — an event that nearby city surveillance cameras failed to capture.

Two days later, after accessing footage from another city camera and a private surveillance camera nearby, New Orleans police identified a suspect, Cornelious Ferrando, 23. In the interim, he apparently had fled to Mississippi and was shot dead during an attempted residential burglary where he shot the homeowners, officials said.

Surveillance cameras have long been an issue in New Orleans.

According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, as crime rates rapidly rose in post-Katrina New Orleans, all levels of government infused money into an extensive surveillance camera system to monitor crime hotspots.

In 2005, the federal government gave New Orleans federal funds to place surveillance cameras in areas potentially vulnerable to terrorist attacks, including Mississippi River levees and bridges, the port and the Superdome. The city’s Office of Homeland Security contributed $1 million as well.

The first cameras went into operation in October 2005. The plan is to have more than 1,000 in operation, eventually.

New Orleans police officers are largely in favor of both the presence of cameras and allowing government access to private camera footage.

“There are city and business cameras on every block,” said a NOPD officer who didn’t want to be named because of department policy. “The cameras serve their purpose.”

But privacy advocates argue that the effectiveness of the cameras is questionable, and the chilling effect on First and Fourth Amendment rights outweighs any minor potential benefits the cameras bring.

Trace Mayer, a privacy activist, said on his website, “The court probably did not foresee how this kind of data could be used, when gathered in large quantities, to profile and identify individuals on a massive scale.”

Digital camera images would be sent for monitoring to a main server archive, where the data is mined. It can be accessed from any location, including police vehicles.

Such surveillance has been beneficial in the past. For example, a network of public and private surveillance footage caught suspected Times Square bomber Faisal Shazad fleeing the scene earlier this month, and police used it to identify him later. British police used footage to identify four suicide bombers who killed 55 people in a subway blast in July 2005.

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