A good overview column on surveillance cameras by Bruce Schneier. I agree with a lot of the points he makes. There is nothing new here, but it’s a good short argument about the use of cameras to fight crime.
Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) is used throughout Chicago. It’s installed in over 40 vehicles. There are also 36 fixed locations. In 17 of those, license plate recognition occurs through real-time video. This is a major development. Using video from a pod camera, it is possible to automatically scan and process a license plate. Here is a summary from an article at officer.com:
Chicago-based EyeNet Enforcement Systems offers technology that can read license plates from video captured by the POD cameras. The camera and license plate reader system is approximately $10,000, and can be used with an existing camera. Some PODs are programmed to point in the direction provided by gunshot sensors and link with EyeNet’s license plate reader system.
Tom Tarach, CEO of EyeNet, says there were challenges with the implementation. “This had never been done before, but the Chicago Police Department was determined to make it work,” Tarach says. “With a few tweaks and adjustments we found we had a working system that could scan license plates from a video stream.” Tarach adds the Chicago police now have two EyeNet readers which can easily process real-time video streams from any of the city’s wireless POD cameras.
ALPR is also installed on the street sweepers. The system photographs license plates of illegally parked vehicles that block the path of the street sweeper, and a violation notice gets sent to the vehicle’s owner. The entire operation is fully automatic, requiring no training or action from the operator. I am not sure how extensive the street sweeper program is at this time.
[From Ex-New York Police Officials Question Crime Data Integrity - NYTimes.com]
As crime statistics have grown in importance in policing, there is always a worry that they are being massaged. There is tremendous pressure on the police to constantly reduce crime based on crime statistics. Viewers of The Wire are familiar with how crime statistics were manipulated in that show. A recent survey of New York Police Department captains and higher-ranking officers indicated some issues with manipulating crime statistics:
The retired members of the force reported that they were aware over the years of instances of “ethically inappropriate” changes to complaints of crimes in the seven categories measured by the department’s signature CompStat program, according to a summary of the results of the survey and interviews with the researchers who conducted it.
In interviews with the criminologists, other retired senior officers cited examples of what the researchers believe was a periodic practice among some precinct commanders and supervisors: checking eBay, other Web sites, catalogs or other sources to find prices for items that had been reported stolen that were lower than the value provided by the crime victim. They would then use the lower values to reduce reported grand larcenies — felony thefts valued at more than $1,000, which are recorded as index crimes under CompStat — to misdemeanors, which are not, the researchers said.
Others also said that precinct commanders or aides they dispatched sometimes went to crime scenes to persuade victims not to file complaints or to urge them to change their accounts in ways that could result in the downgrading of offenses to lesser crimes, the researchers said.
ANPR is widely used in the UK. License plate recognition is an important part of the “ring of steel” around London. According to the Register, there are over 10,000 license plate cameras in the UK, which are reading 14 million plates into a national database (National ANPR Data Centre). The data, including a picture of the plate, is saved for 2 years.
A recent story in the Independent, highlighted some potential problems with relying on ANPR. The story reports that the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) database is “at least 30 per cent inaccurate” in the UK. This has led to the wrongful arrests and car seizures. Moreover, “In 2008, 16-year-old Hayley Adamson was killed by a Northumberland police officer responding at high speed to incorrect information on the ANPR. The officer was jailed last year.”
The UK’s experience is important for the US. As ALPR gains momentum in the US, lets look for ways to use it effectively.
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