Video surveillance or "Community Safety Cameras"?
Sir Chris Fox
In fact, his police work in the United Kingdom, during the course of his 34-year career in law enforcement, was impressive enough to earn him the Queen’s Police Medal in 1996 and the title of "Sir," when he was knighted in the New Years Honors list 10 years later.
Sir Chris is a firm believer in the beneficial use by police departments in the UK of video surveillance cameras – actually, he prefers to call them "Community Safety Cameras" -- providing their use is planned logically, executed properly and measured accurately.
He outlined his views during a presentation I heard in Berkeley, CA, last Thursday, as part of a media event sponsored by ADT Security Services, Inc.
Cameras have emerged in the UK in recent decades as welcome additions to the security landscape.
Sir Chris recalled the role that video surveillance images played in the apprehension of a deranged bomber in England several years ago. Detectives discovered fragments of an exploded sports bag (presumably carried by the bomber), and then spent hours and hours poring over video tapes of the crime scene and surrounding neighborhoods until they found tape of a man carrying such a sports bag before the bombing, but not carrying the same sports bag in other video footage shot after the bombing. Those images of the suspected bomber, widely disseminated by the UK media, led to the mass murderer’s rapid arrest.
During the infamous London Underground attacks of July 7, 2005, images of the four alleged Muslim suicide bombers were captured by cameras mounted in London and throughout the metropolitan area. Those images, plus weeks of dogged detective work, led to the arrests of dozens of alleged co-conspirators, Sir Chris explained.
The former beat cop and police chief, who now heads his own firm, Chris Fox Consulting, which offers strategic advice to companies working with the criminal justice system, understands the objections that some civil libertarians have raised (particularly in the U.S.) to widespread video surveillance by municipalities. But he disagrees, arguing it is necessary to strike the proper balance between security and privacy.
In England, where he spent his career in police work, Sir Chris recalled that his fellow citizens had been terrorized for decades by deadly bomb attacks perpetrated by Irish Republican Army operatives. Exploded buildings, murdered children, shattered glass and bleeding victims were constantly displayed on the front pages of the nation’s tabloids. No wonder, Sir Chris remembered, that the public’s appetite for tightersecurity far exceeded its devotion to personal privacy.
"We got requests from neighborhoods to put cameras in," he recalled from his police work in those days, "but we never got a call to take them out."
By contrast, in the U.S. -- which apart from the attacks of 9/11 has been largely spared from terrorist-related violence -- the protection of personal privacy remains a cherished value among wide swaths of the public.
Sir Chris argues that video surveillance can be a vital tool in the U.S. "You have to accept a certain degree of intrusion for your own safety," he maintains.
Even so, Sir Chris insists that such surveillance systems should be implemented by police departments with great care. Here are a few pieces of advice from Sir Chris:
• The actual monitoring of video images from community cameras should be handled by civilian employees of the municipality, not the police department, to avoid any public perception that the police have become "Big Brothers" intent on spying on the citizenry. "I’d recommend that police should not be monitoring video live," said Sir Chris. "Police should only see what they need to see."
• Cameras can help create a "virtuous circle" in a community, by breaking the downward spiral in which fear of crime leads people to avoid certain areas of town, which in turn reduces public surveillance of activities in that neighborhood, which encourages increased crime, which can lead to a breakdown in all efforts to fight crime. Surveillance cameras can have the opposite effect.
• As video surveillance -- or community safety cameras – become more prevalent across the U.S., it will be important for nationwide standards and interchangeable rules to be established about the use of such captured video, so acceptable evidence can be introduced in any and all courts.
• If a municipality installs cameras, it must commit itself to hire enough employees to be able to respond quickly to signs of trouble brewing. "People will realize that cameras are just cosmetic if the police do not respond," says Sir Chris.
• The future of community safety cameras lies in the intelligent use of video analytics, such as facial recognition (to match "live" video to criminal mug shots), behavior identification (such as a loiterer in a parking lot suspiciously eyeing several different parked vehicles), and automated license plate recognition.
As more and more communities contemplate installing video surveillance systems, the seasoned advice of Chris Fox ought to come in handy.
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