Video surveillance in a different "City by the Bay"
Last week, I visited one such city, Richmond, CA, a blue collar town on the east side of San Francisco Bay, a few miles north of Berkeley. I was invited to tour the two separate video surveillance systems being installed in Richmond -- one in the downtown portion of the city and the other at the nearby Port of Richmond, the nation’s 33rd largest port – by ADT Security Services Inc., which is serving as overall systems integrator on both projects.
The visit enabled me to think about such surveillance systems sociologically (viz., why would a city’s leaders want such a system? and how should they measure their system’s success?) and technologically (what are the cutting-edge technologies that make such systems possible? and what enhancements lie just ahead?). These are important questions because, by one estimate, nearly $1 billion will be spent installing such video systems in U.S. municipalities in 2008 alone.
Let’s begin with the sociological.
Crime is prevalent in Richmond. Violence is a fact of life. Drug dealing takes place on street corners. Loitering and graffiti are commonplace. And Richmond’s citizens are fed up with all of it.
"We think the problems of crime and blight are what keeps the city from reaching its potential," said Bill Lindsay, who has served as Richmond’s city manager for the past three years.
Janet Schneider, Richmond’s administrative chief who has coordinated City Hall’s effort to develop the surveillance system, is even more candid about the city’s motivation. "We’re a city with a lot of crime, and our citizens wanted cameras," she explained.
Precisely what the city hopes to accomplish with its spanking new network of cameras and monitors is somewhat less clear. And how city leaders plan to calculate their Return On Investment (ROI) remains even vaguer.
"ROI at the Port of Richmond was easy," confided Lindsay," because it was other people’s money." (The $2.5 million spent to install the surveillance system at the port was largely funded through a U.S. Department of Homeland Security infrastructure grant.)
But Richmond had to cobble together about $2 million of its own money for the system installed in the city itself -- largely from general tax revenues – and the metrics that it will use to assess the ROI for that $2 million expenditure do not appear to be well thought out.
When pressed, city leaders rattled off a short list of likely applications for their new surveillance cameras. For instance, they hope to monitor private trucks laden with garbage heading for the city dump. In recent years, many of those trucks have developed the nasty habit of dumping their loads illegally, several miles short of the municipal waste facility, alongside the road. If video cameras mounted on poles can capture good images of the law-breaking trucks -- and perhaps their license plates as well – the city might decrease this noxious crime and simultaneously raise some cash (in the form of illegal dumping fines).
The city also hopes to cut down on the theft of copper wire that occurs all-too-frequently on public and private property throughout Richmond. If the cameras can capture images of the copper wires being pulled from utility poles, transformers and other industrial sites – or being transported to nearby metal wholesalers who serve knowingly or unknowingly as "fences" for the stolen wire – city leaders might be able to staunch this pernicious crime.
Of course, the primary purpose for the video cameras is to keep an eye on the street corners, parks, alleys and parking lots that frequently serve as breeding grounds for violent or criminal activity -- the police calls these locations "hot spots" – in an effort either to deter such anti-social behavior or record it for posterity, if it does, in fact, occur.
It’s hard to know whether such widespread surveillance directly cuts down on street crime. In some cities with installed surveillance systems, the early evidence is promising. Greenville, SC, which has a video surveillance system in place, noticed a 26 percent decrease in crime during an eight-month period, according to ADT’s Nick Samanich, including dramatic drops in graffiti and malicious damages to property. In Jersey City, NJ, which also employs such a surveillance system, city leaders measured an 18 percent reduction in crime between 2005 and 2007, Samanich added.
Back in Richmond, crime has already begun to drop, even before the systems goes "live" next month; perhaps because news accounts and street talk about the new surveillance cameras have had a deterrent effect on the bad guys. "Our year-to-year statistics from 2007 to 2008 is going down by 20 percent," boasted City Manager Lindsay.
Political leaders are equally enthusiastic, if a bit less specific, about the benefits they expect from the new surveillance systems. Vice Mayor John Marquez, for example, told me that video cameras at the Port of Richmond would help position it to compete more effectively with rival West Coast ports. "Our thought was to get in at the head of the line," he explained. "We want to be prepared."
Technologically, Richmond’s two systems are employing many of the most advanced surveillance technologies available today.
At the Port of Richmond, port officials, ADT and its team of subcontractors, have constructed a surveillance system whose primary goal is to establish a secure perimeter around the public-owned portion of the public-private port. (Five terminals at the port are city-owned and another 10 are privately-owned.) The public portion is largely occupied by piers, warehouses, headquarters buildings and vast parking lots that store thousands of Hyundai and Kia automobiles imported from South Korea, which are destined for auto dealerships throughout the West.
Because the port has not handled incoming cargo containers since the late 90’s, port officials acknowledged that they face a very low likelihood of a terrorist attack based on weapons or hazardous materials stowed secretly inside arriving cargo. "We’re a niche port," explained the port’s executive director, Jim Matzorkis.
At the port, ADT has installed 64 fixed cameras and 18 pan/tilt/zoom cameras, all supplied by Axis Communications, a worldwide supplier of IP-based cameras headquartered in Sweden. If a fixed camera at the port picks up a suspicious activity, and the system’s video analytics determines that the activity bears closer scrutiny, one or more of the P/T/Z cameras can swing around and zoom in to capture the suspicious scene from a different angle. In fact, the P/T/Z cameras can be pre-set to rotate and focus immediately on specific vulnerable locations that are being watched constantly by the fixed cameras.
The cameras capture video images at 15 frames per second, in MPEG-4 format, and can store the images for 120 days.
The image analytics, which are supplied byObjectVideo, Inc., of Reston, VA, reside on the servers that sit "downstream," in the port’s monitoring center, rather than "on the edge," inside the individual cameras. These days, some suppliers of video analytics and IP cameras suggest that placing the "brains" on the edge avoids the necessity of streaming huge amounts of uninteresting video data back to the monitoring center, thereby consuming large amounts of available bandwidth, but ADT’s engineers don’t see it that way.
In fact, ADT thinks it gains greater flexibility and enhanced processing power by installing the analytics on the central server, and dismisses the notion that this configuration gobbles up too much bandwidth.
"Today, we’re not really seeing a bottleneck in bandwidth," said Samanich, ADT’s director of strategic product planning.
Richmond officials will be asked to choose from among 30 different video analytic algorithms for each individual camera. For example, the analytics can enable a camera to spot an intruder crossing a predetermined "virtual" boundary; identify a bag that has been placed on the ground and left unattended, tell when a person has fallen to the ground, spot a truck that suspiciously stops along the side of a road, and many other suspicious activities.
The video will be transmitted from the individual cameras to the central servers located in the port’s monitoring center, via a series of "nodes" – essentially small electronic devices that serve as receivers and transmitters – that form what is known as a wireless "mesh network." These mesh networks offer at least two advantages over fiber optic cables. They can transmit video data wirelessly over long distances without requiring installation crews to dig up miles of underground trenches, a process that can become prohibitively expensive. And mesh networks can successfully transmit a signal from a camera to the monitoring center even if a single node malfunctions or goes down completely, by automatically re-routing the video signal using an alternative pathway of surviving nodes.
The mesh networks for both surveillance systems in Richmond (which actually are independent of one another) were supplied by a Canadian wireless firm, BelAir Networks, based in Ottawa.
In the City of Richmond, ADT installed 20 fixed and 14 P/T/Z cameras, all from Axis, which will transmit video over a BelAir mesh network comprised of 70 different nodes to monitoring centers located in the city’s dispatch center and a temporary police headquarters building.
This proved to be no small feat. ADT needed to gain permission from the local utility company to mount the cameras and network nodes on utility poles throughout the city. It also needed the blessing of city fathers to trim the branches of several tall trees, whose leaves were interfering with the line-of-sight transmissions between some of the wireless nodes.
Nevertheless, Phase I of the project is nearing completion and the city expects to go "live" in June. How well the system functions – and how effective a crime fighter it proves to be -- remain to be seen. But city leaders are already contemplating the elements of a Phase II expansion. At the top of Richmond’s wish list, says ADT, will be the ability to transmit video signals from pole- and building-mounted cameras directly to monitors and laptops mounted inside moving police cars.
ADT and its vendors are proud of the systems they’ve installed. And the city is eager to flip the switch. But the real question is how will the bad guys react?
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