Smart Cameras Blog

[From Cams a Critical Crime-Fighting Tool: Weis | NBC Chicago]

The CPD and OEMC are drawing attention to the cameras. They claim the cameras have helped to solve 4,500 crimes this year and the cameras have been the lead investigator in roughly 24,000 missions.

Police Supt. Jody Weis on Monday lauded the network of blue light cameras that sit high above Chicago’s streets, . . . “The police can’t be everywhere every minute of the day, so the cameras play a critical role in preventing and solving crime,” he said.

Weis was joined Monday evening by Jose Santiago, the Executive Director of the Office of Emergency Management and Communications, and by Jonathan Lewin, the Managing Deputy Director of Public Safety and Information Technology, to illustrate two recent examples of how the the Police Observation Devices, or PODs, played a role in solving a crime. On May 2, a camera on the 1300 block of East 75 Street appears to show two men in a drug transaction. The camera was being controlled nearby, inside the District 3 headquarters. Once the sale appears to be consummated, a pre-assigned tactical team rushed in and made an arrest.

. . .

In other cases, the address tied to a phone calling to report a crime will automatically trigger the nearest camera to begin looking for the trouble. That’s exactly what happened on July 30, when police say a passenger’s anger over a fare led him to attack his cab driver near the corner of West Elm Street and North LaSalle Boulevard. The camera was triggered by a call and officers then manning the camera were able to communicate to their counterparts on the street to make an arrest.

rshah Chicago

I have been very busy (and will probably continued to be), so the blog won’t be updated as often. But I will try to keep up on all the major stories related to smart cameras and the Chicago surveillance system.

CBS News ran a story that provides a basic overview of the Chicago camera network.

The CPD is using predictive profiling as a new technique, from the Sun-Times and Government Technology:

The Chicago Police Department is working with the Illinois Institute of Technology and the Rand Corp. on an innovative project that will help pinpoint hot spots of criminal activity. The process — called predictive analytics — is to analyze every violent incident and gang interaction with police to extrapolate and identify future problems. The numbers will be analyzed by experts at ITT. . . . Weis explained how the information pinpoints the time of day and location of violent crimes. In the past, gang data were compiled on a yearly basis, Weis said. Now any police interaction with a gang member will be fed into the system for a “real time, ongoing” account of where gangs operate.

For a different angle, the folks at Second City Cop have also weighed in on this technique.

rshah Applications, Chicago