Smart Cameras Blog

Chicago’s surveillance cameras were used to track Chicago School Board chief Michael Scott from a convalescent home to a lonely downtown spot along the Chicago River. By using the cameras, the police believe that Scott didn’t meet up with anybody else during that time.

This investigation highlighted the vast network of surveillance cameras in Chicago. Chicago has approximately 15,000 cameras at its disposal. Two thousand cameras are used for fighting crime by the CPD. The rest can be found at the CTA, airports, Park District, McCormick Place, public schools, and private cameras that have joined the city network.

Despite concerns about big brother, the current network is totally inadequate at monitoring every possible location. As I have previously pointed out, the current network of cameras covers only 5% of the city. (This does not include private cameras that are not networked to the city’s camera network.) Nevertheless, the city’s network is large and impressive.

To illustrate the camera network in Chicago, I am publishing a data set of 1,200 cameras used by the police. I believe this is useful to help educate people about the camera network in Chicago. I also hope that this data can find other innovative uses. I am very curious how this data will be viewed, used, and manipulated to other ends.

The data set can be viewed within either Google Earth or Google Maps through the KML file.

I will keep readers updated on how this information is used.

Update 1: I have also published the mapping data at GeoCommons, see the Chicago Surveillance Cameras layer. This should allow more people to use the data in additional formats, e.g., Shapefiles.

Update 2:

rshah Chicago