Open Source Policing
Written on July 28, 2005
Among other things, the attacks on London have generated hours of CCTV footage
to plough through and a huge public response to the police’s call for help.
What if there were someway of joining these two things together?
If somehow the CCTV footage could be put into the public domain, the police
could harness the public’s desire to help out by getting us to help go through
the video.
Imagine a website where you are presented with a list of videos yet to be
processed alongside the pictures of last weeks attacks. You view one or two
videos in your lunch-hour and mark it for follow-up by the police if you notice
anything significant.
It wouldn’t be a substitute for the police studying the CCTV themselves, but it
would have a faster turnaround and allow much more footage to be examined.
A sort of distributed version of CrimeWatch.
(The major hurdle is that I doubt many CCTV cameras are digital.)
Filed in: Notebook.
Bob
Not too sure about this notion. It seems to rely on rather a lot of trust that those taking part have the best motives. Surely those wishing to further the fundamentalist cause could also take part and deliberately ignore any evidence.
Even those not of such a bent could quite easily miss something. I’d imagine that it would require a lot of concentration to analyse CCTV footage - I’m not sure that the average office environment would be ideal.
However, maybe a way around these problems is to to value the assessment of several independent viewers that are all consistent.