Today's news about the shitty police cameras at Pizza Corner doesn't come as much of a surprise. (Nor is it a surprise that the local dailies gave huge play to the wire story, written by Keith Doucette of the Canadian Press, without adding any reporting of their own. The Herald put it on the front page; it was the cover story for the Daily News.) Apparently the cams, which have been operating for three months, have a slow internet connection and can't usefully be remote controlled from Halifax Police HQ. So they're proving kinda useless.
The heart of the CP story is this:
Beazley said it's difficult to know what affect the cameras have had. "It hasn’t assisted us in a specific investigation as of yet," he said. "What the general deterrence is, is a bit hard to measure." Michael Deturbide, a law professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said he’s not surprised by the chief’s admission. "There’s various studies that seem to indicate that video surveillance does not have any impact on crime, but it’s hard to know what weight to put on studies like that," he said. Last year, Vancouver police abandoned plans for downtown surveillance cameras, citing a study in Britain that showed cameras there do not deter violent crime. (Full story here.)
The chief plans to improve the system and keep the cameras running, but when will they be improved enough that their purported crime-fighting abilities outweigh the actual invasion of privacy? That's down the road, and maybe never. An Associated Press story picked up here by Wired News today talks about the future of surveillance. According to the piece:
Researchers and security companies are developing cameras that not only watch the world but also interpret what they see. Soon, some cameras may be able to find unattended bags at airports, guess your height or analyze the way you walk to see if you are hiding something. Most of the cameras widely used today are used as forensic tools to identify crooks after-the-fact. (Think grainy video on local TV news of convenience store robberies gone wrong.) But the latest breed, known as "intelligent video," could transform cameras from passive observers to eyes with brains, able to detect suspicious behavior and potentially prevent crime before it occurs.
The story ends with a revealing quote from an engineering prof, talking about the surveillance holy grail: Cameras that will be able to tell what's under your jacket. "That is an eventual goal," says the researcher, "but we're not there yet."
