Smart Cameras Blog

[From Video cameras in cars make some cops uncomfortable :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Metro & Tri-State]

The Sun-Times has a story on video cameras in police cars. There are 340 police cars with cameras installed (there are 4,000 vehicles under the CPD). The cameras are pointed “out of the front window and the other aimed at the back seat, where prisoners are transported. Audio is recorded on traffic stops, but not on other types of street stops.”

The interesting part is that the camera system is more about watching police than the public. At one point, officers could turn the cameras off. After all, who wants to have a camera on them while they are working, especially under the conditions police officers have to operate in. The CPD has changed the camera setup, so now supervisors will receive an “electronic alert when an officer is patrolling with a turned-off camera. Eventually this year, new hardware will tie the cameras to the ignition. The cameras will turn on when the key is turned, and they will stay on for an hour even if the car is turned off.”

Another technology that is watching the police in Chicago are the GPS units in police cars. They can determine the following several times a minute: Engine on or off, Idling in place, Parked, Speed, Emergency Equipment activation, and Location. This information is available to police dispatch as well as supervisors (even on their Blackberry).

This story is less about the technology in cars, but how police work is joining a growing set of jobs done under surveillance. While we can think of cameras as neutral, this doesn’t tell the entire story. The cameras affect how people are managed and how they do their jobs. The cameras cut into the autonomy given to police officers. Just take a look at what is said over at Second City Cop on GPS and Weis.

Joe the Cop over at Chicago Now has a thoughtful exploration of a police officer’s stance on cameras. Here is his anecdote on another tracking device in cars:

Back in the mid-90′s my department had tracking devices placed in our squad cars, “for officer safety.” We were told that the trackers could be used during chases if an officer drove into another jurisdiction where he didn’t know street names, or if an officer was injured or unconscious and couldn’t call out his location. A high-ranking member of my department (long since retired) told an assembly of officers that the devices would not be used for disciplinary purposes, and were solely for our safety.

After the devices were installed one of our officers got into a chase that ended 4 towns away. Our dispatchers found out that they could not refresh the computer screens fast enough to effectively use the tracking program during a chase. Strike one. Within months, some supervisors began calling in officers and questioning why they were parked so long at a given location, or why they spent so much time parked next to a fellow officer. It was clear the devices were being used to monitor officer movement and productivity. Strike 2. At a subsequent meeting that high-ranking supervisor told that same assembly of officers that he had never said the program would not be used for discipline. He said–and this was demonstrably false–that he had always described the tracking devices as a management tool. Strike 3. There were a whole lot of officers there that would never again believe anything that came out of that supervisor’s mouth.

rshah Chicago

I created a new red light camera map with revenue data obtained by Barnet Fagel from the Chicago Department of Revenue. The map below shows intersections that have generated $2,000,000 or more in revenue between 2007 to 2009. The complete data set lists the revenue for all intersections with red light cameras for each year (2007-2009). I have made it public, so please drop me a line if you find it useful.

Download the KML here

UPDATE: Here is a link to the complete table with all the revenue information

rshah Chicago, Red Light Cameras

The Chicago Police Department (CPD) uses a formula to calculate whether your neighborhood should receive a camera. If your local corner gets a score of 100, then the CPD may place a camera on the corner. The formula is:

• 1 point for calls for service

• 2 points for reported crimes (public violence, public nuisance, and drug related)

• 2 points for reported arrests (public violence, public nuisance, and drug related)

The formula relies on a 90 day period with a distance of about 200 meters from the camera location. So assuming you could get the data, here is a hypothetical analysis for 5000 W Madison:

100 Calls for Service = 100 points

20 Reported crimes = 40 points

25 Arrests = 50 points

Total = 190 points

The 190 points is above the threshold score of 100 and therefore 5000 W Madison could be a candidate for a CPD surveillance camera.

Unfortunately, the CPD doesn’t make it easy to calculate these scores. Only reported crimes is publicly available at gis.chicagopolice.org. Even then, the CPD restricts you to viewing 14 days of data at a particular location, even though they provide 90 days worth of data. The other two sources of data, calls for service and arrests, are not provided to the public by the CPD web page. Don’t get me started on the lack of crime data, it’s really an injustice!

rshah Chicago

Thanks to the work of the Tribune News App team in posting how to generate maps, I put together a map of 187 intersections with red light cameras.

Here is a link to the KML data, please let me know if anything needs to be updated.

rshah Crime, Red Light Cameras

[From L.A. Consequential - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com]

In a column in the NY Times, Tim Egan’s writes about the crime drop in LA. The LA murder rate is down 50% from 2 years ago. Omaha, Nebraska has a higher murder rate than LA.

Los Angeles is on a pace for about 230 murders this year, in a city of nearly 4 million people. And the department clears — solves and prosecutes — more than 80 percent of the homicides, well above the national average for big cities.

So what is the explanation for the drop in crime? As Egan notes, there are lots of possible factors:

A high-tech mapping strategy, where police move on crime hot spots in something close to real time, was pioneered in New York and mastered here (give praise to William Bratton, who oversaw the departments in both cities, for that effort); the stuffing of prisons with career criminals also gets much of the credit; the role played by legalized abortion, according to the authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in their book “Freakonomics,” in preventing a generation of unwanted children from being born; and the settling down of the drug trade, the source of so much violence during the formative years of narcotic fiefdoms, to such a degree that in many parts of the city there are now more medical marijuana dispensers in Los Angeles than Starbucks outlets (regulated retailers creating an ecosystem of nonviolence).

Interestingly, LA has accomplished this without a reliance on surveillance cameras. Unlike Chicago, where cameras are given prominence, I believe cameras play a tiny role in the LA police strategy. While this is quite anecdotal, it does pose the question of whether cameras are the most effective tool for fighting crime. LA’s successful strategy has focused on using Compstat and hiring more police officers in the last few years.

rshah Crime, Other Cities

A previous post focused on the extent of Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) in Chicago. It noted there were at least 75 locations (both fixed and mobile) operated by the police or OEMC that use ALPR. The post explores the effectiveness of the ALPR technology. For three different sources, here are some statistics on their effectiveness:

In the first ten months of the cameras (starting from January 2006), they had recovered 310 vehicles for the first 2.3 million plates scanned – see Sun-Times from Nov. 2006. By May 2007, there were 725 vehicles recovered and 6.5 million plates scanned. By spring 2009, there were over 13 million plates scanned and 1000 vehicles recovered. (The data also includes arrests). Here is a graph of the recovered vehicles over time:

I was a bit surprised when I saw these results (based on three data points). I would have expected a high rate of recovered cars initially and then a gradual taper to a plateau. First, I don’t have the most reliable data sources. Second, I don’t know much about the circumstances of how these cameras were deployed (how the cameras come online, how they were deployed, where they were use).

The average is one recovered car per day (using over 75 cameras). There are also 325,000 license plates scanned every month on average. If every camera is working equally, this works out to 144 license plates scanned per day with each of the 75 cameras. This is a very low number, because some of these cameras are capable of scanning 3,600 license plates per hour!   I have no idea why this discrepancy exists.

I can’t fully explain this data, but I thought it would be useful to publish it. Please let me know if you have any explanations.

rshah ALPR, Chicago

[From The Wired Repo Man - He’s Not ‘As Seen on TV’ - NYTimes.com]

ALPR is moving beyond law enforcement and finding other uses. This article shows how repossession agents are using ALPR to find vehicles that are delinquent. The repo agent drives around until their ALPR finds a car that is delinquent (one rep man uses a ka-ching cash register sound for successful matches). The database of delinquent cars comes from MVTRAC, which has a national database of around 100,000 cars. The article also contains a sidebar on the potential privacy issues.

rshah ALPR