I spent a brief amount time working with smart city tech. You might be surprised just how many cameras and sensors already exist that are monitoring you at any moment as you walk down the street. The issue usually isn’t that there’s no evidence for crimes, it’s that investigating those mostly petty crimes, outside of secure areas is an extremely low priority for police departments. For example, I’ve had the police reject my video evidence of a hit and run where the driver admitted to it on camera, because they didn’t want to spend resources investigating something that didn’t result in a death.
I stopped working with smart city tech because I felt there’s only two realistic directions it can go: Excessive surveillance by the police, or excessive surveillance by people whose only interest is selling whatever data they can collect about you in public spaces to advertisers and other 3rd parties.
I just recently got my window smacked in a mid size city. Was very pricey, but I wouldn't want to give my state permanent location data in exchange for the possibility of catching some random perpetrators. On the contrary, I would perhaps become a criminal because I would try to smash the cameras to protect my privacy.
Surveillance still is one of the most uncreative and probably also one of the worst forms of crime prevention/reduction.
I doubt someone will have the time to follow you going home in the camera. When massive surveillance is deployed, there's such an enormous amount of data that police would only have time to review those related to crime.
> Very high quality visual/signals surveillance seems like a much more obvious market fit.
Oh, yeah, there are already companies the provide complete surveillance of cities or large areas of cities so that even if a crime scene is discovered hours or days later, they can just go back to that time and track vehicle movement to and from the crime scene to wherever it ends up as long as it's in the same (large) area.
Reducing the cost of the equipment that does the recording of the area will only make it more accessible to more police departments, for better or worse.
I live in Oakland and I would love it if the police had more surveillance tools at their disposal. Of course oversight is important, but the current political climate is far too wary of surveillance in public areas. Many parts of Oakland have issues with violent crime, vandalism, and theft. Often, criminals get away because the police don't have the resources to track them.
For example: Just two nights ago, a crazy homeless man tried to assault me with cinder blocks. Had I not been able to outrun him, I'd certainly be in the hospital. I called the cops, but by the time they arrived, the man had taken off on bicycle. The police couldn't find him. He'll likely victimize quite a few more people before he's caught.
Last week, an intoxicated driver hit a parked car in front of my home and drove off. Cops couldn't track the car. The driver is still out there and still a danger to others.
On a bike ride a couple months ago, a driver got behind me in the bike lane and yelled that he would run me over. Again, no arrest.
The likelihood of being caught is incredibly low, and antisocial people know this. Better surveillance of public areas would increase the chance of arrest and discourage such psychopathic behavior. I'm having a really hard time imagining a scenario in which this cure is worse than the disease. It is other civilians who endanger my life on a monthly basis, not police.
We have reached the levels of desperation whereby the police are willing to employ a technology that clearly does not work, in order to pursue a goal of policing with fewer police officers.
You only have to look at the widespread increase in CCTV use in Britain. Now when you get mugged in London the police can get you a little video of your hooded attackers for posterity. Except they only have time to go through the recordings if you got murdered, otherwise you will just get a crime number.
Exceptions for law enforcement have proven to be a very slippery slope in the past. Police is constantly trying to erode restrictions around tools that are only available for serious crimes and unfortunately also has a record of successfully circumventing any access checks for surveillance tools that have been put in place by lawmakers. There is constant and incessant lobbying from these circles to get more surveillance in place. But, when pressed, no one can point to cases where this actually helped.
The only realistic way to counter this is to say no to surveillance technology from the start.
> Street cameras in particular seem to me to be a lot more about retaliation and crime solving rather than actual prevention. You still get murdered, but now society catches the killer.
Catching criminals is certainly a good thing to do. It may also prevent crime since criminals often commit more than one crime if left on the streets. Crime prevention is not the only thing that needs to happen. Compare with firefighters that will both need to prevent fires and put out the fires that happened anyway. There is also the perceived need for justice - "Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done." Cameras will help in this context.
Are cameras really a privacy problem in our GPS-enabled Wifi BLE cellphone tracking device infested world? A world where your face is tracked on every photo uploaded to Faceboo, and your Wifi and bluetooth MAC are logged in every AP you pass on the street and sent to advertisers and security agencies for storage and processing.
Crime prevention can be improved by using machine learning and AI. We may end up with a Minority Report style society. Is the prevention of crime worth the trade-off?
I'd rather know how the Union Square Business Improvement District’s (USBID) camera network operates as a single service with people monitoring it, where they can just hand over access to police. These para-municipal agencies seem pretty dystopian.
The problem with this stuff is that it cuts both ways. You think you are protected by these surveillance schemes, but then your local government starts tolerating petty crimes like vandalism, auto theft, vagrancy, and shoplifting because it centralizes their role in "managing" (read: extracting value from) it, offering protection to favoured constituencies in exchange for support, and then when you want to shovel a tent off your property, paint over grafitti, or discourage a shoplifter, those cameras neutralize you because you can't take the risk of being charged because you actually have something to lose. Cameras don't stop criminals, they just neutralize law abiding residents from discouraging threats to themselves and their community.
American urban environments really need more cameras to reduce crime. If we want to have walkable cities we need to solve urban crime issue. Many here on hacker news are against pervasive video recording due to privacy concerns but I think with right data access and data retention policies privacy issue can be mitigated. It's a balancing act. Video recording along with stronger enforcement would go a long way making American urban environments more desirable places to live and hang out vs suburbs.
I think the cameras and electronics are great. A good way to reduce crime as opposed to adding more police. It's worked well in London to the best of my knowledge and I think we could use more of that in general.
What I object to is Google being the one entrusted with this data, with no oversight, and cross-referencing it with all the other data they have on me.
Despite good intentions and my own discomfort, I can't help but feel like the anti-surveilance movement is mostly an extension of privilege politics and virtue signaling. Police brutality is a real problem, but a wildly common observation of life in the hood/ghetto/LI-housing is the prevalence of crime. You could make neighborhoods a lot safer with a lot fewer police by using modern methods like facial recognition cameras and unmanned aerial surveillance. Break-ins and robberies suddenly become wildly easy to punish afterwards and a lot of investigative work like tracking gang members to get a sense of their operations morphs into a trivial affair. We're rapidly approaching the point where basic physical crime is optional and while there should obviously be oversight and moral considerations at every step I can't help but feel it's a bit entitled of me to live in an okay neighborhood (some crime but its mostly kids drinking in parks and hobo drama) while telling people that the risks are too great to use this kind of tech in any circumstance.
Yeah but the funny thing is that these surveillance networks never actually seem to be used to solve normal crimes. Is it laziness on the part of the police? Are they trying to reserve these systems for more serious crimes so we forget they exist? Is it just a matter of time before police culture catches up and we see license plate readers, cell phone records, CCTV networks, etc used to track down petty thieves and robbers?
Last year the police were begging for help to solve some of the gun store robberies that happened during the BLM unrest. Why did they need the public's help? They could have checked cell phone records, stitched together traffic camera video, and likely tracked down the suspects within weeks.
I think the most likely scenario is that we gave all these tools to create a surveillance state, but the bureaucracy is too lazy to use them.
I don't honestly believe that the allocation of additional surveillance resources would have helped.
What's more likely, IMO, is that the crimes you described would never be solved even with millions of dollars in surveillance resources allocated to Oakland.
Also, this is one side of a story. Who's to say you aren't making things up, exaggerating, or even minimizing your provocation?
Do you think surveillance resources would have been best used solving a case of road rage? How many drones and cameras should have been used to bring justice to a mentally ill homeless man? Would you have preferred a helicopter was deployed to locate a damaged car that may or may not have struck your vehicle?
The truth about crime is that most of it goes unpunished, a fact every adult has to come to terms with eventually.
There aren't enough cameras in the world to stop a cop from filing your police report in a stack of paperwork and forgetting about it.
The city is in a budget season right now and people are being arrested for things that normally would not be cognizable as crime.
I agree that we should be willing to pay some nontrivial price to have more eyes on policing, but this camera installation push (both here and subway) is a big concern because we don't know how it will impact arrests and prosecution yet.
Many cities already have industrial cameras installed on the streets and inside public transport (buses, trams, subway), as a way to prevent crime.
Until recently the issue was that no one had technical and financial resources to analyze the data, except on court warrant, but once Big Data and computer vision technologies become cheap enough someone will definitely use that as real time surveillance tool.
I stopped working with smart city tech because I felt there’s only two realistic directions it can go: Excessive surveillance by the police, or excessive surveillance by people whose only interest is selling whatever data they can collect about you in public spaces to advertisers and other 3rd parties.
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