The city of Tampa became the first city in the nation to use high-tech security cameras to scan crowds for wanted criminals.

This doesn't surprise me.

Across the nation, video cameras are routinely used to record transactions at ATM terminals. Cameras are commonplace in banks, day-care centers, hospitals, government buildings, casinos and convenience stores. Cameras are even being used at traffic stoplights to detect red-light runners, and in many cities, offenders receive a traffic ticket in the mail.

Video technology is everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except nursing homes.

In every state, nursing home residents and their families are being denied the right to use video technology for their own protection - even if the equipment is provided at their own expense and used in the privacy of their own room. Legislation introduced this year in Maryland, Arkansas, Texas and Florida to give nursing home residents this right failed. Instead, Florida legislators decided to "study" the issue. Do we really need another study?

Recent studies have shown that most nursing homes are dangerously understaffed. In fact, last year Florida led the nation in short staffing. Every day nursing home residents are suffering and dying from malnutrition and dehydration - not as a consequence of their medical condition, but because the nursing home doesn't hire enough staff to feed them or offer them something to drink. In some cases the nursing home staff has been found eating the residents' food!

Every day newspaper stories tell of other horrors: residents wandering away and drowning in ponds or drainage ditches. Residents dying after being beaten, raped or bitten by fire ants. Residents suffering from pressure sores clear to the bone because they weren't turned or repositioned. Residents lying for hours in their own waste, call bells not answered, residents strangling on restraints or bedrails. The list goes on and on.

In 1998 the Coalition to Protect America's Elders conducted a study of Florida nursing homes and found that 25 percent of the employees had criminal records. Perhaps that explains why residents' possessions mysteriously disappear during the night or while they are being showered.

Government agencies that are supposed to regulate nursing homes and make sure they comply with state and federal laws are failing to protect residents from harm. Yet families are being denied the use of a valuable tool that would allow them to observe what happens and, more importantly, what doesn't happen when they cannot be there.

Shouldn't the safety of frail, vulnerable nursing home residents be a top priority? Shouldn't nursing home residents and their families have the same right to utilize video technology for their own protection as the city of Tampa has to use it to detect wanted criminals?

If a nursing home is truly the residents' "home," then why can't they install cameras in their own rooms for their own protection if they or their legal representative want it and pay for it? It just doesn't make sense.

Barbara Hengstebeck, a former Tampa resident, is the executive director of the Coalition to Protect America's Elders.

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