Chicago Developing 'Suspicious Behavior' Monitoring System

narramissic writes "Over the past few years, Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC) has been blanketing the city with a network of thousands of video cameras in an effort to remotely keep track of emergencies in real time. Now, with the help of IBM, the network is getting some smarts. IBM software will analyze the video and ultimately 'recognize suspicious behavior,' says OEMC spokesman Kevin Smith. 'The challenge is going to be teaching computers to recognize the suspicious behavior,' said Smith. 'Once this is done this will be a very impressive city in terms of public safety.'"

Re:Good or bad?

[garcia]

'Once this is done this will be a very impressive city in terms of public safety.'

It will also be impressively Orwellian and unnecessary. I'm waiting for those famous Midwestern militias to get determined and start systematically tracking and disabling these cameras so that the rest of us can continue to go about our business w/o the prying eyes of the government.

I'm tired of traffic cameras, red light cameras, and the government's position that you are in the public and thus not anonymous in your actions. That rhetoric worked when you were manning more human police officers to do the work, not when you decided to become lazy and act like the public are your DVR favorites for watching and scanning at a later time.

Re:Good or bad?

[vidarh]

There's a huge difference between arresting and punishing someone for a crime that hasn't happened yet, and sending a police officer around to ask someone what they are doing, or to observe and be ready to intervene if someone does something illegal.

If the system for example could recognize signs of someone being followed, it might be enough to dispatch a police car to drive past or ask the person being followed if they want assistance to help avoid a lot of serious crimes from being committed.

Now, there's still room for abuse (train the system to recognize likely politically unpopular groups and send police to intimidate, for example), but that doesn't automatically mean that there can't be ways of making this system useful without making it intrusive.

Re:Good or bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm waiting for those famous Midwestern militias to get determined and start systematically tracking and disabling these cameras so that the rest of us can continue to go about our business w/o the prying eyes of the government.

As long as you and everyone else keep waiting, it will never happen. Change occurs when people get fed up and do something about it themselves rather than waiting on someone else to solve the problem for them. If we hadn't been so gung-ho as a nation on giving other people the responsibility to protect us from terrorists/criminals instead of having the balls to take care of ourselves, then perhaps we wouldn't be in the position of needing to hope that a different set of other people will take responsibility to get our rights back now that we gave them all away. :-P

Now you've done it!

[Mille Mots]

You are aware, of course, that few things are as suspicious as pointing out that the Emperor(s) strutting around naked, right?

Re:Obviously ...

[moeinvt]

'Chicagoans should go out of their way to act "suspicious"'

That will work until big brother makes it a crime to "act suspicious" under the premise that it's deliberate interference with law enforcement activities, and therefore a threat public safety.

Re:Suspicious Behaviour in Chicago - on live TV?

[Dr. Eggman]

On tv...now that gives me an idea! What if we pipe all the survelliance video feeds into the local access tv channels, flipping every couple of minutes and setup a hotline for citizens who watch the channels to call in and report suspicious activity! No complicated AI computer development and it has citizen oversight!

Re:London

[SuperKendall]

The cameras were shown to have zero impact on deterrence of crime. However, that's different than saying they might help solve crime, or that different use of the cameras would act as a deterrent. Jury is still out, but with the expense of having them it's hard to say if it's worthwhile.

They may help solve a few really serious or high profile crimes though, which would perhaps lead to people deciding they are worth having.

Jews...

[Anonymous Coward]

...were also processed like cattle in the 1930's, thanks to Big Blue. I am saddened that they haven't changed all that much, assisting a totalitarian government in having an omnipresent peering eye. Read up on it. [wsws.org] The past is being repeated.

Schizophrenia and ticks

[flyingfsck]

So, what about the mentally ill and disabled people? Will they be harrassed till they leave town?

Re:Mired in statistical fallacies

[pclminion]

In other news, this system would classify 0.09% of all activity as true positives which are also false, miring the poster in statistical fallacy.

In yet other news, doctorcisco falls for the fallacy that the sum of the false positive rate plus the true positive rate must be 1. It needn't be, and often isn't.