5 ms·

Tens of thousands of CCTV cameras, yet 80% of crime unsolved

9 points by danw 19y ago

byrneseyeview 19y ago
"In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average." I really hate when they don't tell you the marginal benefit, just the absolute result. I would assume that the places with the most cameras are the ones with the most crime. (The relevant urban legend is that some time in 1917, Ukrainian communist rebels noticed that the provinces with the most sick people also had the most doctors -- so they rose up and killed the doctors)
ivankirigin 19y ago
I've worked in automated surveillance. No one is watching the feeds. A trained professional watching a single video feed will miss 90% of important activity after 20 minutes. There are 3 million CCTV cameras in the UK. Like I said, no one is watching. But automated surveillance is getting very good. A single server can currently run around 5 video streams. At least that was what Intellivid could do last I spoke with them. They do retail loss prevention. They're based in Cambridge and look like a good company for any hackers. www.intellivid.com Very, very soon, all of these CCTVs are going to be "turned on". Computers will find anomalous behavior, identify people from their gait (how they walk -- surprisingly more reliable than face recognition), track them across multiple cameras even with large gaps in footage, etc.. Gunshot detection and localization is pretty easy, but goes beyond the camera systems. There is a book everyone interested in the topic needs to read on the subject: The Transparent Society http://www.amazon.com/Transparent-Society-Technology-Between-Privacy/dp/0738201448/ http://www.amazon.com/Transparent-Society-Technology-Between... The solution is not regressing. The systems are here. The solution is openness. Almost all government CCTV feeds should be open to public view, for example.
- BrandonM 19y ago
  Is all of that "progress" you mentioned really a good thing? I personally don't think I like the idea of all of my public activities being monitored and indexed, whether I'm doing anything wrong or not.
  - ivankirigin 19y ago
    You can't really do anything about it, so may as well join the good fight and make the system work for you. I've thought about it a lot, and it seems like bad hygiene to give such powerful tools to the government. But if we can't stop them, we may as well make them work well. There is nothing to stop private companies though, and they have a bottom line interest in tracking you. See Cory Doctorow's short story about the day Google turned evil. ...which was a few years ago :)
- pixcavator 19y ago
  >The solution is openness. Almost all government CCTV feeds should be open to public view, for example. Second that. Just put them on the internet, how hard is that?
  - ivankirigin 19y ago
    Very, very hard actually. justin.tv was happy about 14000 simultaneous feeds. How would you make the data transmission backbone to accommodate something 1000 times bigger? The big push for automated surveillance is in fact a response to network usage. It used to be that you record onto tapes. Everyone thought that stunk, so they started recording to DVRs. But then you need to transmit lots of imagery to central servers. It would make more sense to put some intelligence on the camera end and only transmit when something interesting is going on. For example, reliable motion detection would only send video when there is something new in the scene. But either way, yes, everything should be online all the time.
mynameishere 19y ago
On the bright side, horseplay is down 40%, youthful exuberance has been cut in half, high spirits are at an all-time low.
- darkclark 19y ago
  The beatings will continue until morale improves!
deleted 19y ago
[deleted]

9 points by danw 19y ago

"In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average." I really hate when they don't tell you the marginal benefit, just the absolute result. I would assume that the places with the most cameras are the ones with the most crime. (The relevant urban legend is that some time in 1917, Ukrainian communist rebels noticed that the provinces with the most sick people also had the most doctors -- so they rose up and killed the doctors)

ivankirigin 19y ago

I've worked in automated surveillance. No one is watching the feeds. A trained professional watching a single video feed will miss 90% of important activity after 20 minutes. There are 3 million CCTV cameras in the UK. Like I said, no one is watching. But automated surveillance is getting very good. A single server can currently run around 5 video streams. At least that was what Intellivid could do last I spoke with them. They do retail loss prevention. They're based in Cambridge and look like a good company for any hackers. www.intellivid.com Very, very soon, all of these CCTVs are going to be "turned on". Computers will find anomalous behavior, identify people from their gait (how they walk -- surprisingly more reliable than face recognition), track them across multiple cameras even with large gaps in footage, etc.. Gunshot detection and localization is pretty easy, but goes beyond the camera systems. There is a book everyone interested in the topic needs to read on the subject: The Transparent Society http://www.amazon.com/Transparent-Society-Technology-Between-Privacy/dp/0738201448/ http://www.amazon.com/Transparent-Society-Technology-Between... The solution is not regressing. The systems are here. The solution is openness. Almost all government CCTV feeds should be open to public view, for example.

BrandonM 19y ago
Is all of that "progress" you mentioned really a good thing? I personally don't think I like the idea of all of my public activities being monitored and indexed, whether I'm doing anything wrong or not.
- ivankirigin 19y ago
  You can't really do anything about it, so may as well join the good fight and make the system work for you. I've thought about it a lot, and it seems like bad hygiene to give such powerful tools to the government. But if we can't stop them, we may as well make them work well. There is nothing to stop private companies though, and they have a bottom line interest in tracking you. See Cory Doctorow's short story about the day Google turned evil. ...which was a few years ago :)
pixcavator 19y ago
>The solution is openness. Almost all government CCTV feeds should be open to public view, for example. Second that. Just put them on the internet, how hard is that?
- ivankirigin 19y ago
  Very, very hard actually. justin.tv was happy about 14000 simultaneous feeds. How would you make the data transmission backbone to accommodate something 1000 times bigger? The big push for automated surveillance is in fact a response to network usage. It used to be that you record onto tapes. Everyone thought that stunk, so they started recording to DVRs. But then you need to transmit lots of imagery to central servers. It would make more sense to put some intelligence on the camera end and only transmit when something interesting is going on. For example, reliable motion detection would only send video when there is something new in the scene. But either way, yes, everything should be online all the time.

mynameishere 19y ago

On the bright side, horseplay is down 40%, youthful exuberance has been cut in half, high spirits are at an all-time low.

darkclark 19y ago
The beatings will continue until morale improves!

deleted 19y ago

[deleted]