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Should we be responsible for our own surveillance?

In the British model of policing, officers exercise their powers with the implicit consent of the public – termed ‘policing by consent’. In other words, the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of the public is based on a general consensus of support which follows from transparency about the powers of the police, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so, writes James Wickes, the chief executive and co-founder of Cloudview.

Today, however, power is increasingly being devolved from the centre and the role of the police is changing, either by design or budgetary necessity. They are becoming less of a visible deterrent and more of an emergency service to be called on when trouble arises. The government’s intention is to build partnerships between the police and the public and create a society with actively engaged citizens, taking part in joint patrols, looking out for their neighbours and passing on safety tips.

One way in which the community could play a greater role in reducing crime is by taking an active role in CCTV surveillance – in effect, giving Neighbourhood Watch a digital makeover!

In the rest of this blog I’ll outline the need for increased public involvement, explain how it could work and provide reassurance that it won’t be a move towards a ‘Big Brother’ state. Instead, shared access to the millions of private surveillance cameras would be a positive, proactive way to kick-start greater collaboration. It would also supplement police resources which are already tightly stretched, as highlighted by research by HM Inspector of Constabulary which found that more than a third of people had not seen a police officer on patrol for a year.

Police services are already duty-bound to respond to activity captured on private cameras which purports to identify a person responsible for, or suspected of, criminal activity. They deal with imagery from a huge number of privately-owned CCTV systems, from retailers’ footage of shoplifting incidents and nightclubs’ recordings of violent customers to domestic CCTV footage of burglars. Police officers have to plough through hours of footage to find, and then safely store, the record of an event that may be presented as evidence at some future date.

The number of cameras is increasing, particularly in ‘quasi-public spaces’ (entrances to public buildings, shopping malls, hospitals, transport hubs etc.), but most councils and police services do not have the back office infrastructure in place to support them. Only recently have some forces set up CCTV operations centres to collate information gathered from different cameras, including privately owned ones.

To date, limited technology has excluded the public from taking an active role in CCTV style surveillance – apart from having their behaviour recorded, which is governed by the Data Protection Act. However, we are all increasingly becoming video savvy, recording and sharing events as they occur using our connected digital devices and social networking. Most of us accept these images as a real time account of events, and when they are required as intelligence or evidence there are rarely accusations of tampering. This online network can and should be used to cement local communities and authorities together.

The combination of the IoT and the next generation of cameras – digital video cameras that transmit images and data over the internet – mean that neighbourhoods can now feasibly create networks to monitor their own geographic and/or special interest communities. In effect, this is an extension of the established concept of Neighbourhood Watch, furthering its core idea of fighting crime as a community while actually enhancing everyone’s ability to do so. Low cost IoT based systems allow many more cameras to be installed, with an accessible micropayment pricing structure that would make it cost effective for any authorised person in the community to access the footage that is captured.

With cameras installed throughout a community, people inevitably start worrying about a Big Brother state observing their every move. But this new generation of IoT surveillance is very different. First, with IP cameras, motion detection can be set up so that the camera only records when a person moves into a zone where they should not be, such as entering private property, and only footage that is deemed to be showing suspicious activity can be recorded. Second, it is not the state that is watching with community-installed cameras, but the community itself.

I believe that this next generation of IoT surveillance systems can bring together communities in the fight against crime and disorder, helping them to safeguard their environment. By involving the public in the solution, they move away from the Big Brother association, and with ‘surveillance by exception’ they offer an acceptable approach to the problem.