Street Cameras

[hooblabla6262]

My elbow is sore.
It has been this way for almost a month now.

You see, my girlfriend and I were walking from my place to my mother's house one weekend, as I had promised to take care of her pets while she went out of town.
On route to our destination, I was hit with a windshield ice-scraper from the window of a speeding vehicle. The object in question burst in to many pieces as it made contact with my arm and back.

Now I'm not usually one to demand justice, but had my girlfriend been standing on the other side of me than she would have been hit. So I called the cops.
It being some time in the middle of the night, the best description I could give was a beige vehicle that was kind of box-y.
I was told not to expect any results.

So I ask, is there any legitimate reason not to have street security cameras to assist in police matters such as this one? Do you guys and gals have any stories which could have gone better with the presence of such cameras?

 

[Thaluikhain]

Well, Big Brother is watching you. Upsets some people. IMHO, being watched in public, well, that's no big deal.

 

[Starnerf]

Cost is probably the biggest reason. Cameras require some kind of storage along with someone to monitor and maintain them and for police departments that are already notoriously poorly funded, patrols are probably just a better use of their time and money. I've seen several stories about cities that are removing their red-light cameras because the public got wise to them and now they cant afford to keep them running.

One compromise they're using in my area is a gunshot monitor that listens for gunshot-like noises and alerts the police when one is detected.

 

[DoPo]

Cost is probably the biggest reason. Cameras require some kind of storage along with someone to monitor and maintain them

Yup, the biggest reason, easily. Well, installation and maintenance can be outsourced, so the overhead for that is not too much, however, it's still a cost. Cheap cameras are shit, decent ones are the lowest you should go for and they do cost money, especially if you need many of them. You also need the cameras to transmit the footage somehow (easy if they are on wireless, but maybe not all are - what then? hop on a cable? use 3G? these do cost money. Wireless may as well). Then you have storage - few cameras can easily rack up few terabytes of data per day. Where are you going to store that? Sure, space is cheap but how long are you retaining the footage for? A couple of days - then you can miss stuff from before, a week - then prepare several petabytes at least. You'd also want the footage secured - you have to overprovision for backups. Heck, this is important info - you need several layers of it - throw RAIDed disks and remote storage backups, too. You also need to analyse and process the footage, presumably - are you going to pay people to stare at a screen or whip out the big money for some software to do large parts of the work for you?

And then you have to deal with the issue of people maybe not being very comfortable of being watched.

 

[Angie7F]

I never really thought about it, but I am sure it will come in handy when shit hits the fan.
I dont know if there are many street cams in Tokyo....
Definitely in the stations though

 

[J Tyran]

The cameras in the UK have cleaned up some areas, huge social housing estates for example learned the hard way that such areas needed a small local shopping center. They typically have a small super market, post office and a take away or two. Problem was the council estates are crime hotspots, poor education standards, poverty and unemployment means they are rough areas.

These little shopping centers often became no-go zones, local authorities began a program of fitting extensive CCTV systems around them. The yobs largely disappeared making them safer for residents and crime detection rates increased, a lot of crime simply was not reported. Lots of crimes like rapes and murder are often solved by CCTV, in a serious crime investigation the police will collect footage from public and private cameras and track the movements of the victim in the time before the attack and identify anyone that looks suspicious to either eliminate them from the inquiry or catch the offender.

Cameras are also becoming much more effective, night vision is becoming more common (active IR & image intensification) and facial and behavioral recognition tech are truly becoming big brother like. Software can track the way a person is acting and flag it for operator attention and facial recognition can track a database filled with images of suspects and then the CCTV will automatically follow a person around a wide area from camera to camera.

People do have legitimate concerns about privacy, there have even been some examples of some rather nasty shenanigans. An Islamic community in Birmingham was confronted by a series of CCTV cameras popping up in residential streets, where as very few (almost none) had cameras in elsewhere in the city. It was discovered the cameras had been funded by government anti terrorist legislation, the implication was pretty shocking i.e. we think you are terrorists so we are watching you. Not many communities would be happy be happy with that.

There are also some other dangers like over reliance, believing that cameras could replace other types of security or reduce the number of police officers on the street. They do help though and do make people safer, is that worth the expense and possible invasion of privacy? I do not know.

 

[Strazdas]

So I ask, is there any legitimate reason not to have street security cameras to assist in police matters such as this one? Do you guys and gals have any stories which could have gone better with the presence of such cameras?

Irrational fear of "evil forces (tm)" taking control of it and following you, lack of education in significance of crime repellants, egoistic demands on personal privacy and a multitude of societal disorders are to blame for extreme hate of all security cameras.
Lets just say, i would have loved if there was a camera looking my way when i got stabbed. But that street didnt had lights back then, let alone cameras.

 

[Genocidicles]

As long as they're not in your own home or selling the footage to companies for marketing data I don't see what the problem is.