Are Citywide Surveillance Cameras Effective? (msn.com) 95
The Washington Post looks at the effectiveness — and the implications — of "citywide surveillance" networks, including Memphis's SkyCop , "built on 2,100 cameras that broadcast images back to a police command center every minute of every day."
Known for their blinking blue lights, the SkyCop cameras now blanket many of the city's neighborhoods, gas stations, sidewalks and parks. The company that runs SkyCop, whose vice president of sales previously worked for the Memphis police, promotes it as a powerful crime deterrent that can help "neighborhoods take back their streets." But after a decade in which Memphis taxpayers have paid $10 million to expand the surveillance system, crime in the city has gone up....
No agency tracks nationwide camera installation statistics, but major cities have invested heavily in such networks. Police in Washington, D.C., said they had deployed cameras at nearly 300 intersections by 2021, up from 48 in 2007. In Chicago, more than 30,000 cameras are viewable by police; in parts of New York City, the cameras watch every block. Yet researchers have found no substantive evidence that the cameras actually reduce crime....
In federal court, judges have debated whether round-the-clock police video recording could constitute an unreasonable search as prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. Though the cameras are installed in public areas, they also capture many corners of residential life, including people's doors and windows. "Are we just going to put these cameras in front of everybody's house and monitor them and see if anybody's up to anything?" U.S. Circuit Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson said during oral arguments for one such case in 2021....
Dave Maass, a director at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation who researches police surveillance technology, said these systems have expanded rapidly in the United States without real evidence that they have led to a drop in crime. "This often isn't the community coming in and asking for it, it's police going to conferences where ... vendors are promising the world and that they'll miraculously solve crimes," Maass said. "But it's just a commercial thing. It's just business."
Nonetheless, the Post notes that in Memphis many SkyCop cameras are even outfitted "with license-plate recognition software that records the time and location of every passing car."
No agency tracks nationwide camera installation statistics, but major cities have invested heavily in such networks. Police in Washington, D.C., said they had deployed cameras at nearly 300 intersections by 2021, up from 48 in 2007. In Chicago, more than 30,000 cameras are viewable by police; in parts of New York City, the cameras watch every block. Yet researchers have found no substantive evidence that the cameras actually reduce crime....
In federal court, judges have debated whether round-the-clock police video recording could constitute an unreasonable search as prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. Though the cameras are installed in public areas, they also capture many corners of residential life, including people's doors and windows. "Are we just going to put these cameras in front of everybody's house and monitor them and see if anybody's up to anything?" U.S. Circuit Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson said during oral arguments for one such case in 2021....
Dave Maass, a director at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation who researches police surveillance technology, said these systems have expanded rapidly in the United States without real evidence that they have led to a drop in crime. "This often isn't the community coming in and asking for it, it's police going to conferences where ... vendors are promising the world and that they'll miraculously solve crimes," Maass said. "But it's just a commercial thing. It's just business."
Nonetheless, the Post notes that in Memphis many SkyCop cameras are even outfitted "with license-plate recognition software that records the time and location of every passing car."
Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, they are effective at increasing surveillance of regular citizens and transferring taxpayer money to some scumbags. They do nothing to decrease crime. I thought that data from the UK from a few years back already made that abundantly clear.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
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The five little pigs in Memphis were actually caught on a government-owned camera ... though I suspect that no one would have examined the footage too closely if their victim didn't die.
They should be put on Federal trial under 18 USC 242 ... it wouldn't be a shame if they went to the 'chair. Though 20 years in general population would also be OK.
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Let's just ask Tyre how much they helped him out?
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Once again, that sure helped Tyre out, didn't it.
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Once again, that sure helped Tyre out, didn't it.
I’m pretty sure that if the after life existed and you asked him if he wanted the cops to be held accountable, to go to trial, be convinced and serve time in prison or simply get away with it and continuing to murder countless other people, this would help him. Also helps his family, also helps the other people who just haven’t had the time to be these criminals target yet, and their families, the list of people it helps is pretty large.
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Police cameras, no. Civilian cameras or cameras not under police control, yes,
Why would who owns the camera make them more or less effective?
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
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They weren’t concerned about their body cams at all, but boy when they noticed the pole cam they sure got nervous, changed behavior, and kept looking at it.
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Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, that's the story being told by the cops and vendors. Is there actual data to show that it is true?
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Is there actual data to show that it is true?
That isn't clear. Everyone involved has an ulterior motive to twist the data.
Even TFA doesn't say they don't help, only that they don't make a "substantive difference." WTF does "substantive" mean in that context, and why use weasel words at all?
Nonetheless, when public money is spent, the burden of proof is on those spending the money, not on those trying to stop the spending.
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Even if they do help in some way, it's not an acceptable form of policework.
The standard is: if you want a public police presence, you have to actually put officers on the street in some fashion to do the job. You can't just film everyone on a widespread presumption of guilt.
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Actually having cops visible would help reduce crime. Cameras are just good for persecuting someone after the crime is committed. Ask Tyre about this, oh wait. You can't. Those cameras sure made a difference on that one.
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So the crime rates falls as the perpetrators are removed.
Uhm.... the story says the crime rates have gone up.
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Now, I'm not saying cameras actually reduce crime, but if you want to determine that you can't look just at the overall crime rate.
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The obvious solution is to compare areas with cameras to other areas in the same city without cameras.
I am very skeptical if the cameras increase crime in such a comparison. What plausible reason would cause that?
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> The obvious solution is to compare areas with cameras to other areas in the same city without cameras.
Yes, still tricky finding comparable sites.
> I am very skeptical if the cameras increase crime in such a comparison. What plausible reason would cause that?
Yeah, not saying just some possibilities: rise of authoritarian oversite, one more potential source of bias, deterioration of community, rise of bravado.
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For that, look to how crime rates are measured. If the additional cameras allow the police to detect crimes happening, where before they were going unnoticed and unreported (either unintentionally or intentionally) - then you can have crime rates increase because of the cameras alone!
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By the same argument, even a falling crime rate does not equate cameras actually reducing crime.
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Uhm.... the story says the crime rates have gone up.
What plausible explanation could explain crime rates going up because of camera surveillance? It's only reasonable to assume crime rates are going up for other reasons not being controlled for when gathering these statistics.
I would look at funding for social services and police, and the general economic health of Memphis over the past decade. Crime is primarily an economic problem, not a moral problem.
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Uhm.... the story says the crime rates have gone up.
What plausible explanation could explain crime rates going up because of camera surveillance? .
I guess if you spend 10M on cameras, you aren't spending that money elsewhere where it could potentially do more to reduce crime...
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So the crime rates falls as the perpetrators are removed.
...except that their "removal" is generally temporary.
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That is not what the data from the UK shows. It is however the naive authoritarian conviction. Which is not based on actual facts, as usual. This stupid mindest gave us utter and complete fails like the "war on drugs".
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They help persecute a criminal but they don't actually STOP crime. Most these idiots are still going to commit crimes after they get out of jail. The stats on recidivism support this. No idea if they have cash-free bail in the cities in question though. Then those cameras really don't stop crime, since we just let the criminals out with a promise to show up at court...
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mk, you can go back to 4chan now, this is not the discussion forum that you are looking for
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With any luck, they'll fry in the electric chair for what they did.
Tennessee uses lethal injection. Executions are rare. The last one was three years ago.
It is very unlikely that Tyre Nichols's killers will get the death penalty. The murder was not premeditated and the state may even have difficulty proving it was intentional. Although they were violent and callous, that isn't the same as wanting him to die.
Most likely, they'll get 20 years or less, and serve only a fraction of that.
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Sounds like you want first crack at them. Go to it, tiger.
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They won't and the cameras won't bring back the dead. So they didn't really stop a crime at all.
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Not that I'm saying you're wrong, but what "data from the UK from a few years back"?
Probably that "study" from the DM that counted all the public and private CCTV cameras from a stretch of street in London then multiplied that by the length of all the roads in the country. You know, bollocks.
In any event, more cameras doesn't mean more crime, it means more detected crimes.
as an innocent person I don't want to be spied on wherever I go.
Understandable, but good luck with living your life without working, buying food, driving a car or using public transport.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
The evidence points the other way. From CCTV surveillance for crime prevention, a 40-year systematic review with meta-analysis [hkvisa.net]: The findings show that CCTV is associated with a significant and modest decrease in crime.
My own experience with cameras is they helped immensely with getting the police to act, which in turn had a modest knock on effect crime rates. Eg, report "Neighbour reported occupants of white utility truck, rego XXX, knocking down fence get out of my property, which they were trespassing no" and get the response "shrug". Follow up with: trespassing has been a problem for a while, so we installed a trail camera and have photo of white utility truck, showing rego, timestamped within a few minutes of neighbours report, here it is". Response changes to, "OK, here is the paperwork, file a report". Long term result: trespassing has dropped off.
Again, not really. As others have said here, no one has the time to look at these cameras in real time. 99.99% of the time they record, no one looks, and the recordings are overwritten in a few weeks. Merely walking past these camera's is not enough to get yourself surveilled, there has to be some antisocial act committed nearby before anyone takes any interest. The recording being taken may make you uncomfortable, but my reasoning is along the lines of "if a dog barks in the woods and no one hears him, is he bad?".
This is not to say these things will always be benign. People may not have time to look at these things continuously, but AI's will. In fact they do in China, and because of that merely having a conversation with a person carrying a placard of a panda bear labelled "Xi" may get you locked up. But in the west we haven't reached that point yet, and while that remains true these cameras are mostly harmless.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
>"My own experience with cameras is they helped immensely with getting the police to act"
Your own experience is with non-government-owned cameras. And I support that. But the topic is really about government-owned and/or controlled mass surveillance.
Citizens and businesses have an interest in watching and protecting their own property/people. If something criminal happens, they can and will provide footage to the police or a court. If there is good reason, most would also provide specific footage about a crime of which they were not even a victim to the police as well, especially if asked, and certainly if compelled by a court order. That is the safeguard- *we* are in control. *We* store the recordings and access to them. *We* decide what is recorded, where, how, and how long it is kept.
I do not support mass government surveillance in any form. There is simply too much potential for abuse. It flies in the face of a free society. I also do not support allowing any government agency to have access to private cameras, at will. They should go through proper channels to obtain access EACH TIME.
* Cameras CAN be a deterrent to crime, but not as much as some people think. Hoodies have always been a thing, and now masks as well. Criminals can be surprisingly brazen.
* Cameras are mostly useful for determining what happened after the fact, not during. There is nowhere near enough resources to monitor scores of live cameras, and reaction time to anything happening live is not a thing, either.
* Knowing what happened through video records can help catch people who commit serious crime and hold them accountable. But only if the police are willing to catch them and only if the DA is willing to actually prosecute them. Both have been under attack, and it is one [of many] reason crime has escalated.
* I DO support the mandatory use of video capture devices on police officers. That is our check on them. As agents of government force, they have an obligation to transparency.
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Maybe it gets smarter crims to be more aware of the cameras / locations before they do crimes.
I have personally witnessed criminals commiting shoplifting and hanging around the area outside the shop and getting caught sometime later - after checking the cameras.
And this wasn't even with hidden cameras - there is even a big screen in front of the cashier counter showing a live view of all the cameras in the shop.
Cameras may have made the above average crims act smarter in how they commit crimes but when it c
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Indeed. This is usually done the ElCheapo way and even criminals are not stupid enough to fall for that longer-term.
Devil's advocate here (Score:2)
Of course if we had a media that didn't just breathlessly report whatever the cops put in their press release that w
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So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
It could just be that the cops are too lazy to use it. Surveillance shouldn't be used to solved petty crime. But, it has to be made available to solve serious violent crime, homicide, rape, kidnapping, things like that. For things like finding that Idaho killer.
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Uh, before any po-pos get mad at me .. what I meant by lazy is under-resourced.
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Under resourced? You almost had me going there for a minute. If the cops are driving around in decommissioned armored personnel carriers they certainly aren’t hurting for funding. The pussy Uvalde cops already got a budget increase after standing around listening to children get shot.
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The EU spends $277 billion [europa.eu] on "public order and safety", while the US spends $215 billion [moneygeek.com] on policing and corrections. On a per capita basis those two are fairly equal.
I was expecting to agree with you before I googled the statistics, especially because of the US prison system. But it looks like we only overspend on the military, not police.
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Uh, before any po-pos get mad at me .. what I meant by lazy is under-resourced.
Police are only under-resourced when factoring in how many things our police are expected to do. Police funding could go way down if you remove the war on drugs, fight poverty in a meaningful ways, adequately fund mental health services, and institute reasonable national gun laws.
But without removing those things I would agree many police departments are underfunded. We spend about the same as Europe per capita on police and prisons, but have almost three times the prison population, 4-5 times the homicide
Re: So what? (Score:2)
Most people could get behind that if cops would stop being racist. But since the cops won't stop being racist, we can't have any nice things.
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>"Most people could get behind that if cops would stop being racist"
There is no credible evidence of significant police "racism", unless you twist the word around to mean something it really doesn't mean. And, sadly, that seems to be the new norm.
Re: So what? (Score:2)
If you don't think there are credible stats demonstrating cops are racist... well... like Jeff Foxworthy says...
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Keep in mind that doesn't necessarily mean Black or Mexican or anything else. The purpose of a minority is to keep people who work for a living from Forming collective groups in order to increase their bargaining power with the owner class. America for example was well on the way to near universal unionization when racism got in the way. But if it wasn't racism t
Just a privacy rapists’ tool (Score:1)
They don’t call it “surveillance capitalism” for nothing.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: I wonder... (Score:3)
Pretty sure it started with purges and re-education camps where the populace is indoctrinated in spying on their family and friends.
Lack of sane rules governing these (Score:2)
In the e
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>"The police did a demo of it for everyone to see. At the time of recording the very first thing the system does is mask out any neighbouring private houses. I thought that was good."
The reality is, any promises they make are meaningless. At any time, cameras can be changed to point at something different, record more than they say, unmask things that were masked, store footage longer than claimed, shared with other agencies, connected to AI systems to track people, and used for any purpose they see fit
Orwellianism (Score:2)
Re: Orwellianism (Score:4, Insightful)
I think most people are generally fine with cameras in public places. I think the real frustration comes with the patchwork system not being able to deliver the results we might expect. And of course residential cameras. But the government isn't putting up those residential cameras, your neighbors are.
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They shouldn't be, though. That's the point.
No, just look at (Score:1)
No, just look at East Germany before the fall. They had a far more effective setup but the cost was way too much for them.
You can put up all the cameras you want, but there is a real cost with monitoring and maintenance. never mind the potential abuse. Money for this needs to come from someplace.
Re: No, just look at (Score:2)
They didn't have cheap double digit TB HD's or computers for datamining.
Given the economic productivity hit of even petty crime, society can afford a lot of cameras, storage and ANN's.
Effective for prosecution. (Score:5, Interesting)
These systems aren't designed to prevent crime, but it makes prosecution easier. Unfortunately at the other end of the equation, how effective is prosecution and incarceration at actually reducing crime.
But, once you add neural networks into the mix it gets scary what these will evolve into.
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That is pretty much correct although one would imagine cameras have some degree of deterrence effect but that would have to be studied and connected somehow which would be pretty difficult.
On the other hand though the clearance rate for everything but homicide is under 50% and the homicide clearance rate is at an all time low even with more cameras than ever. Not a causation but a pretty significant correlation.
I'd like to think of clearance rates were over 70% it would have some downward pressure on crime
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>"But, once you add neural networks into the mix it gets scary what these will evolve into."
Indeed it does. And that is what we SHOULD be worried about. That "no expectation of privacy in public places" retort kinda falls apart when a "super being" can track your every single move everywhere you go, have instant access to that information, share it with every government agency, and access it potentially for extremely long times. Even if the AI is neutral, the people controlling it might not be.
You can
Original article (Score:2)
Here's a link to the original article over on WaPo
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Re:Original article (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a better link (no paywall):
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Public access might make them effective (Score:2)
At best it moves crime (Score:3)
No, they don't prevent crime, at best it moves it. Are you going to do a drug deal? If you look up and see a camera, are you suddenly not going to sell or buy the drugs? OF course not, you are going to walk around the corner to where the camera can't see you and do your deal there. Are they all over the neighborhood? Then you are going to set up your deal in the next neighborhood over and do it there. Sure, it might help prosecute the dumb or desperate criminals who still do illegal things in view of the cameras, but chances are they would have been caught anyway.
Enough: this balloon thing (Score:1)
Los angeles (Score:1)
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The Venn diagram intersection of stupid shit and illegal shit is a pretty large subset. The Weirdos know this. The complement of illegal stuff in stupid stuff can also wreck your life if you need a background check, security clearance, etc. Weirdos who avoid the illegal stuff, but later in life want an interesting job come to find this out the hard way. Some people are just destined to be dishwashers or short order cooks thanks to cameras or nosy neighbors.
Yes, yes they are (Score:2)
Though no surveillance footage was available from inside the restaurant, investigators located images of the shooter's vehicle through smart street-light cameras,
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/verdict-to-be-read-in-trial-for-man-accused-in-deadly-churchs-chicken-shooting/2734769/ [nbcsandiego.com]
I've worked on these systems (Score:2)
Nobody can afford enough cameras of high enough quality to make a real difference to crime. What the cops can do with them is make the public feel like they're living in Orwell's nightmare state.
In my professional opinion, a better solution is to subsidize private security cameras (which doesn't cost much with how inexpensive they are these days) with a requirement that you supply video on request to the cops.
And in my opinion as a free citizen, you ought to refuse any such offers, buy your own damn system
Deterrence is not the same as prosecution (Score:2)
This article is conflating two totally different things. The first is deterrence, which is the question of the reduction of incidences of crime. The second is the actual prosecution of criminals, which is totally disjoint from deterrence: One could effectively prosecute criminals without actually deterring crime at all.
The other part of this is how effectively the crime can be prosecuted, and another is how effective is the penalty of the crime.
The mere presence of the cameras serve no intrinsic purpose. Ar
They are effective (Score:2)
They found out that in all the cities, most crimes were committed by a guy with a hoodie, a face-mask and sunglasses.
Must be the same guy.
Useless (Score:2)
We have camera systems on our buildings. We've had break-ins where we have perfect, clear, HD video with audio. We file a police report, we upload our videos to the local PD Axon system. Nothing ever happens beyond that. Unless they catch the person in the act or already have them in custody the cops won't do anything, nothing at all. Why would municipal camera be any different?
Now the city has put in ALPR all over and tracks where everyone goes an at what time, the kind of information that you previously w