Getting San Fran Surveillance Right

Surveillance cameras mounted at First and Mission Streets in San Francisco

Big news. Despite doing many things wrong, San Francisco has still managed to reduce non-violent crime by an average of 24% in areas where they deployed surveillance cameras. Yet, a main objective to reduce violent crimes has yet to be accomplished. But, what would it mean if the city did everything right? That question wasn't addressed in a substantial piece in the SF Chronicle today, but the statistics the article provides are making for some pretty interesting food for thought.

The article cites a recently released study that shows that San Francisco's surveillance program has failed in its primary goal of reducing homicide and other violent crime, although it has succeeded in reducing such lesser offenses as burglary, pickpocketing and purse-snatching. While this statistic is important, it should be noted that San Francisco's cameras are not monitored in real time, but rather the footage is ordered by investigators only after the crime is reported; privacy controls prevent city police from monitoring the city's surveillance cameras in real-time. The privacy controls are so stringent, in fact, that I recently wrote about a man forced to spend 69 days in a San Francisco jail waiting for access to surveillance video footage that ultimately exonerated him. The city can and should be doing much better.

Protecting Privacy With Technology vs. Non-Use

There is very little excuse these days for deploying city surveillance and then not monitoring cameras or granting police and attorneys access to footage that helps convict or exonerate. That's because identity protection and search engine technology exists today that enables police to actively monitor and query city surveillance systems without sacrificing privacy. The ACLU recently wrote about one example of this kind of technology from 3VR Security, and these kinds of approaches are getting better every day. Had San Francisco deployed its surveillance system with this kind of privacy protection technology, it would not have been necessary for the city to take the extreme step of locking police out of its surveillance infrastructure.

The Value of Image Quality and Data Storage

In San Francisco, image quality and data storage are two other major concerns. The cameras the city purchased and installed for $700,000 in 2005 are high-resolution, but produce only three frames per second and thus the footage appears choppy (movies are shot at 24 frames per second), making it difficult to identify even license plates – forget about trying to recognize a repeat car thief or vandal. Again technology may provide an answer for the city. Instead of storing everything and an equally poor frame rate and video compression level, why not use face and license plate detection algorithms to smartly track and store relevant information when, and only when, it is detected. Intelligent approaches that separate what is important from what is not have been proven to dramatically improve both the quality and storage longevity of surveillance archives.

A Fully Integrated Platform

Traditional surveillance systems often require an army of people to patrol the system and report suspicious activity to a security manager. However, by using networked systems that apply analytics and reporting, municipalities can service security functions of hundreds with an army of one. By incorporating the latest innovations in face recognition, license plate recognition, video motion alarms and other new technologies to make systems more effective and efficient, municipalities can vastly improve the results of their security systems. As John Honovich points out in a recent contribution to Government Security News, "cameras enable officers to assess and respond over much greater areas at much lower cost. Even in the U.K., famous for its mass public deployment of surveillance cameras, video surveillance costs are only one one-hundredth of police costs."

Creating A Better Solution

Ultimately, video surveillance is nothing new and many cities are capturing hours and hours of footage on a daily basis. However, that endless volume of footage must be managed to be valuable, and even if a surveillance system features the highest quality cameras, the best image resolution, and a fully integrated network, the resulting video footage isn't going to be useful unless it can be stored, analyzed and searched – in real time. Search and analytics would dramatically improve the usability of the footage and make the surveillance network that much more effective in achieving its objective of crime reduction.

With the right ingredients, municipal surveillance has the potential to significantly counter criminal activity, but it takes that correct formula and a scientific approach to have such results. Despite its inefficiencies, the San Francisco municipal surveillance system isn't a disaster by any means. If Newsom can bolster its allotment of the 2009 budget and add the aforementioned features into the existing infrastructure, San Francisco has the opportunity to have one of the largest municipal surveillance systems out there operating smoothly, meeting and perhaps even surpassing expectations.