Councils expanding public safety CCTV networks

More than half of Australia’s local governments now operate closed-circuit TV (CCTV) surveillance systems, a survey of 221 councils has revealed, as a growing proportion turn to increasingly intelligent cameras to proactively ensure safety and efficiency in public spaces.

The latest figures, published by the Australian Institute of Criminology, showed a steady increase from a similar survey a decade ago, when just one in 10 councils was using CCTV systems and the remaining 90% said they had no plans to install one.

Fully 57% of councils said they are now using such systems, with a further 12% saying they were planning to install one. Queensland councils were the most likely to be using CCTV (67%) and the Northern Territory had the fewest (41%).

The mean number of cameras in use was five, with 53% of respondents having 20 or fewer cameras and 12% having 100 or more in operation. Cameras were typically spread between outdoor shopping malls, recreational areas, entertainment precincts, car parks and roads, council property and other areas.

Demand by government authorities has been picked as the key driver for growth in the network video surveillance market, with research firm IHS Technology recently predicting that adoption by Australian councils in particular would drive the $190m market at 5.5% annual growth through 2019.

Significantly, the type of cameras in use has changed substantially over time, with around 85% of cameras relying on digital image-processing technology — up from 60% in 2005. Some 80% of cameras now use colour imaging, compared with 62% in 2005.

The rise in use of digital analysis capabilities reflects the increasing ability of cameras to make autonomous decisions about content of interest. Many cameras historically stopped at motion detection, but new change-detection capabilities can pick up when an item has been abandoned in a public space, for example, while face detection and tracking can pick persons of interest from live video streams.

Various vendors have released proprietary implementations of the technology and, earlier this year, Microsoft’s Project Oxford machine-learning effort released Azure Face APIs, which can recognise faces and also guess the age of the person in the footage.

Such capabilities will position increasingly intelligent cameras as field workers to help law-enforcement authorities cover more areas without increasing the manpower required to monitor them. Most council cameras — 61% now, compared with just 31% in 2005 — were being used for recording only, with the proportion of cameras monitored occasionally during business hours (15% vs 22% in 2005) and 24/7 (8% vs 16% in 2005) declining commensurately.

“Bringing information into meaningful intelligence, and distributing it quickly and effectively to [authorities in] the field, will provide much more intelligence at their fingertips,” says Steve Crutchfield, ANZ managing director of Motorola Solutions — one of many companies building next-generation public-safety infrastructure in Australia.

“If you look at the power of a centralised C&C situation with a lot of different data sources in and around a specific event, including social media feeds or feeds from other sensors, authorities can make better decisions and a lot sooner. They can take control of localised CCTV to verify the situation before they dispatch resources.”

Despite the presence of more cameras today, councils are spending less time watching them — a finding that the study’s authors said was “not particularly surprising”. This reflects the rise in the use of cameras as documentation tools, collecting forensic evidence that is available to police when and as needed.

Indeed, the survey found strong involvement from police, who typically work in conjunction with councils to leverage the information collected through the cameras. One in five councils said they were handling CCTV footage requests from police weekly, while 19% said such requests came once a month on average and 17% said once a quarter. The footage was most often used to help police successfully identify an offender, and was also often used in prosecutions.

There were lingering questions about the cost-effectiveness of the systems as these accounts were largely anecdotal, the report noted. “Councils invest significant financial resources in CCTV, and many have received external funding for the installation of CCTV,” it says.

“However, there remains a significant number of councils that have chosen not to install CCTV, most often because it is not viewed a strategic priority, because crime is low, or because funding was not available.

“Councils have in place a range of different approaches to the collection, storage and monitoring of CCTV footage... More research is required in order to better understand the impact of CCTV footage on criminal investigations and the capacity of police to identify and apprehend offenders.”

Image courtesy Mike Fleming under CC