I first got intrigued with the issues facing City Surveillance after reading a study earlier this year that San Francisco published on the results of their video systems. I commented on this in an earlier blog post:

http://spotonsecurity.com/2009/02/06/san-francisco-surveillance-study-shows-need-for-analytics-and-real-time-response/

Then I began researching further and discovered that public studies by cities around the world were reporting almost identical results.

Now a new report just released by the UK Home Office with researchers from Sweden and the USA summarizes over 40 studies from around the world, and their conclusions are talking about exactly the same things that I noticed. Here is a link to that new study called, Effects of Closed Circuit Television Surveillance on Crime:

http://db.c2admin.org/doc-pdf/Welsh_CCTV_review.pdf

They show that traditional CCTV surveillance systems produce a small reduction on crime in some areas – on the order of 7% – but it has little or no impact on violent crimes and has its best results in parking lots and preventing property crimes.

What jumped out at me when I studied all of these reports was that they were missing the underlying causes of such disappointing results.

We’ve been seeing a significant growth in what we call Remote Guarding, where video analytics detect breaches of security or potential problems and send video clips to remote security personnel who are trained to respond through audio down to the site. This actually prevents the crime, compared with just recording it as in most traditional systems.

The results have been powerful in the commercial sector, for three basic reasons:

  1. The cost of pro-active monitoring is now practical for the first time. Where one person looking at a bank of monitors might at best keep an eye on 10-20 cameras, and do a fairly poor job of catching things, the Remote Guarding system that uses video analytics can have one person responding to 1,000 cameras or more and doing a much better job seeing potential problems.
  2. Traditional systems have not been able to respond quickly enough, even if they can detect a crime in progress. The time it takes for police to get to the scene means that they are often there too late. This is one reason why existing systems have had almost no impact on violent crimes. If you can have an instant response, you can stop a dangerous situation from escalating. This is far more powerful than mopping up after the murder or attack.
  3. The quality of the video was often poor because frame rates were too slow and resolution was scaled back in order to reduce bandwidth and storage costs. Storage in the camera and using analytics to intelligently control the recording solves these problems, as I’ve mentioned before.

These are issues that we’ve been solving in the commercial sector with Remote Guarding for the last few years, and are exactly the same underlying issues cited throughout all the city studies I read.

In other words, Remote Guarding using video analytics for detection and IP audio for response has the potential to transform city surveillance.

The commercial sector is seeing 50% to 75% reductions in costs compared to on-site guards, while improving protection and reducing crime dramatically. There is no reason I can think of that this same formula won’t have the same impact on preventing crime in our world’s cities, public parks and hotspots.

Security Systems News just ran an interesting article talking about the growing interest in private monitoring of public places:

http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/?p=article&id=ss200905c7kwET

In there, you’ll see the first case of Public City surveillance using Remote Guarding. Birmingham, Alabama, has contracted with ION Interactive, who has deployed VideoIQ’s iCVRs throughout the city, along with some commercial locations.

Richard Cruit, the COO of ION Interactive,  and I just ran a webinar this last week, sponsored by SDM Magazine, talking about the results in Birmingham and how Remote Guarding can have a significantly positive effect on City Surveillance.  You can watch this webinar from SDM’s archives by going to this link:

https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=144275&sessionid=1&key=CF33F1A5642D363ED9BDA7202D2EBFD8&partnerref=website&sourcepage=register

It is time for a new approach to city surveillance and how to use video to reduce crime. The technology is here, and the results are coming in every day that prove how effective it is. With all the money being invested, we shouldn’t be settling for small reductions in crime, when we can make our video systems pro-active and help break the cycles of crime before they happen.