ORLANDO, Fla. — He told police he had just bought a new iPhone and was just testing it out. But what police say Lorenzo Ramirez was actually doing at a Mount Dora Wal-Mart was taking pictures up a woman’s skirt; that was three years and two generations of the iPhone ago.
Ramirez pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 12 months of probation for video voyeurism. The case was one of the first in central Florida but has hardly been the last.
In the last 24 months, Eyewitness News has reported on at least 18 incidents of a person either captured on store security cameras looking under a woman’s skirt or a person arrested for committing the same act.
However, law enforcement said that number may be higher since many times the suspects carry out the crime without anyone noticing.
“A lot of these people don’t just do it for their own sexual pleasure, but they do it for their own identity,” said University of Central Florida criminal justice Professor Dr. Stephen Holmes. “You see this more often than you’ve seen it ever before.”
Experts said part of the driving force behind the upskirt trend is combination of technology and easy access. The Internet is littered with websites that allow users to view other videos and upload their own.
Meanwhile, the almost constant access to cameras on smartphones with a connection to the Internet means videos can be captured just about anywhere and shared within seconds.
“They have a fantasy, and they try and live that fantasy,” said Holmes. “You can upload a video almost instantaneously and thousands of people can see it and if it goes viral millions of people can see it.”
The Florida statute dealing with the crime of video voyeurism (810.145) defines the act as “for his or her own amusement, entertainment, sexual arousal, gratification, or profit, or for the purpose of degrading or abusing another person, intentionally uses or installs an imaging device to secretly view, broadcast, or record a person, without that person’s knowledge and consent, who is dressing, undressing, or privately exposing the body, at a place and time when that person has a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
The state further states the penalty for video voyeurism as “a person who is 19 years of age or older and who violates this section commits a felony of the third degree.”
Despite the penalty, "As of Feb. 6, 2015, there were five inmates in prison for video voyeurism as their primary offense," according to McKinley Lewis, communications director for the Florida Department of Corrections.
In the Ramirez case, the probation sentence came with no prison time and adjudication withheld.