Company proposes privately funded camera network for downtown

[thelakelander]

Focused on Downtown

DOWNTOWN -- The owner of a wireless Internet company serving Downtown and St. Augustine businesses has proposed a plan to equip Downtown with up to 94 cameras for police to monitor the area for crime at no cost to Jacksonville.

Mark Marques, president and CEO of Joytel Wireless Communications Inc., who lives and works Downtown, developed the idea in consultation with neighboring business owners who worry that people are deterred from going there by safety concerns.

"I walk to The [Jacksonville] Landing at night to see clients, and I often get harassed," Marques said.

The wireless camera system he has proposed offers advantages compared with a hardwired system, he said. The cameras are more readily deployable and aren't subject to having their wires cut. Also, such a network is more scalable; extra cameras can be added or removed as needed.[/quote]

full article: http://jacksonville.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/stories/2008/04/14/story2.html?b=1208145600^1617809

[Jason]

Cameras may help but they certainly don't prevent crime.  Just look at how many idiots we see every day robbing a convenience store knowing they're being filmed.

Also someone harassing for money probably doesn't care that they are on film either.

Cameras are great but they need to be backed up by an increased police presence.  St. Augustine has put cops back on the beat why can't Jax?

[JeffreyS]

I think the offer is something we should take advantage of. Camera's aren't going the be a cure all but I think it could help. Kudos to Joytel for this offer. 

[Jason]

What privacy are you giving up?  If you're in the middle of downtown you can't get much more public than that.

[downtownparks]

If the cameras are in public areas, I don't know that privacy concerns come in to play.

I think its a waste of resources, and I think its a sad commentary that people view being panhandled as some great threat. But aside from that, meh, whatever. I go downtown without them, I would go with them too.

[thelakelander]

I always thought Jax was a few years behind.  This funny.  The same thing discussed today was going on in Tampa when I was working down there a few years ago.

Ybor cameras won't seek what they never found
After two years of fruitless monitoring, Tampa is dropping facial-recognition software that looked for crooks. It never led to a single arrest.

By BRADY DENNIS, Times Staff Writer
St. Petersburg Times
published August 20, 2003


TAMPA - In the end, everyone the secret cameras scanned turned out to be just another face in the crowd.

Two years after Tampa became the nation's first city to use facial-recognition software to search for wanted criminals, officials are dropping the program.

It led to zero arrests.

"I wouldn't consider it a failure," said police spokesman Joe Durkin. "You are always looking for new and efficient ways to provide the best service to the community. There's going to be ups and downs."

Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio did not return calls Tuesday seeking comment about the practice.

The city first toyed with the technology during the 2001 Super Bowl, when surveillance cameras monitored people entering Raymond James Stadium.

That led critics to dub the game, "Snooper Bowl." And although cameras picked up 19 "hits," or possible matches with wanted criminals, none were arrested.

That June, New Jersey-based Visionics Corp. offered the city a free trial use of a similar program called Face-It, and the software was installed on 36 cameras in the Ybor City entertainment district.

A Tampa police officer in a room three blocks away monitored a wall of televisions and, with a click, could pick out faces from the crowd to scan and run through a criminal database to search for matches.

Even as the software proved unsuccessful in nabbing wanted offenders, it did a superb job of attracting outrage from critics.

Republican Dick Armey, the House Majority Leader at the time, called for congressional hearings on the controversial surveillance technology.

Leaders from the American Civil Liberties Union denounced the practice, likening it to something out of George Orwell's novel 1984.

Scores of protesters donned bandanas, masks and Groucho Marx glasses and took to the streets of Ybor City on a busy Saturday night to show their contempt for the face-scanning system.

The software also created false alarms, faces that seemed to match but didn't. In at least one instance, both police and a Tampa man ended up embarrassed.

Rob Milliron, then 32, wound up on a surveillance camera one day while at lunch in Ybor City. Tampa police used his photo to demonstrate the system to local news media.

A woman in Tulsa, Okla., saw his picture and fingered him as her ex-husband who was wanted on felony child neglect charges. Three police officers showed up at Milliron's construction job site, asking if he was a wanted man.

Turns out he had never married, never had kids, never even been to Oklahoma.

"They made me feel like a criminal," Milliron said at the time.

Critics of Face-It celebrated on Tuesday, saying that the Millirons of the world can finally walk down the street without fear of humiliation.

"It's a relief," said Darlene Williams, chairwoman of the Greater Tampa Chapter of the ACLU. "Any time you have this sort of technology on public streets, you are subjecting people who come to Ybor to an electronic police lineup, without any kind of probable cause. The whole episode was very troubling."

Scanning companies such as Visionics and Identix (which since have merged and are known as Identix) saw their stocks soar in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

But the technology's success in actually catching wanted criminals or terrorists has apparently been marginal. Critics claim it is unreliable and ineffective, and potential customers such as the Palm Beach International Airport have passed on the equipment after test runs, saying it gave too many false positives and wasn't cost-effective.

The company could not be reached for comment.

Durkin emphasized Tuesday that the trial run with Face-It didn't cost the city any money. But even so, he said, its use likely benefited the city.

"Something that's intangible is how many wanted persons avoided (Ybor City) because the cameras were there," he said. "That's something we may never calculate."

Durkin said even without the face-recognition software, the cameras in Ybor will remain.

Meanwhile, facial-recognition technology has been in use at the airport, jail and jail visitation center in Pinellas County for more than a year, and at the courthouse since late April. And Pinellas sheriff's officials have no plans to discard it, although they have not attributed any arrests to the technology.

Pinellas sheriff's Lt. James Main, who heads the program for Sheriff Everett Rice, said Rice's office is confident the technology works well and is a useful security tool, despite the lack of arrests.

"We don't have any plans to change anything here," Main said. "The fact that we aren't making arrests doesn't mean the technology isn't working."

He said Tampa's use of the technology is far different than in Pinellas. In Tampa, the technology isn't used in a controlled environment like the inside of a well-lighted courthouse, where people can be asked to take off hats and glasses.

Rather, he said city officials across the bay gambled on the ability to pick faces out of a crowd:

"To Tampa's credit, they were trying something new."

- Times researcher John Martin and staff writers William Levesque and David Karp contributed to this report, which used information from Times archives.

http://www.sptimes.com/2003/08/20/Hillsborough/Ybor_cameras_won_t_se.shtml

[Joe]

^ There's no right to privacy on a public street in a single one of your examples. Period.

[Jason]

All of that could just as easily be seen by any one of the thousands of downtown patrons.  Does that keep people from doing the things you've listed?  Nope.  Should the sight seeing binoculars be removed from the riverwalk as well, because you might actually see your wife making out and smoking pot and drinking beer in a car with your best friend outside of LaCena?

I just don't see the point of requesting privacy in public places.  If the cameras are mounted in private locations such as the restrooms in the Main Library then I have a problem with it.  But onthe streets its a given that somebody could be watching you at any given moment.  If your not doing anything you shouldn't be doing then you should have nothing to worry about.

[thelakelander]

The biggest issue I could see with the cameras is mistaken identity, such as in Rob Milliron's case in Ybor City a few years ago.

[Jason]

The article says that cameras are to be monitored by the police.  Are we not to trust them anymore?

[Joe]

Joe, there is always a right to privacy.  How far have we bought into this fascist state dogma that anyone believes that you have no rights to privacy?

Shouting "fascism" doesn't change the fact that you still have no right to privacy on a public street in any of the situations you outlined. Your indignation doesn't change the reality of the valid distiction between being in the public vs private realm. I'm not sure what else to say without being overly rude.

[downtownparks]

I don't see how its any different than if a cop happened to drive by while doing something illegal. Should they put on blinders in the off chance they see crime as it happens, rather than waiting for a call to come in?

The only place the "police state" argument comes in to play is if the use of these recordings are used to arrest, detain, or otherwise harass people, otherwise, you can make out on the sidewalk all day long without fear of arrest or harassment, aside from perhaps the irritated glances of passers-by who think that type of thing should be done in the privacy of ones own home/car/ect.

[Midway ®]

The only place the "police state" argument comes in to play is if the use of these recordings are used to arrest, detain, or otherwise harass people, .....

That's exactly the point. Getting the technology infrastructure in place is the hard part. Using it for those purposes that you deem unacceptable as above is just one small easy step.

If you want to police the streets, then hire more police. Having cameras all over the place just gives the city administration an excuse to cut police that are out on patrol, claiming that the cameras do a better job. So they will be able to watch you being murdered, instead of preventing it in the first place.

But on the bright side, that video of you being murdered will be a big hit on youtube, and you will have your 15 minutes of fame posthumously.

And BTW, anyone with more than the intelligence of a flea cannot watch these monitors for more than an hour, so the people that wind up watching them usually are at or below the flea level, So, it will be those people who will be your first line of defense.

[Jerry Moran]

Focused on Downtown

Company proposes privately funded camera network

DOWNTOWN -- The owner of a wireless Internet company serving Downtown and St. Augustine businesses has proposed a plan to equip Downtown with up to 94 cameras for police to monitor the area for crime at no cost to Jacksonville.
Mark Marques, president and CEO of Joytel Wireless Communications Inc., who lives and works Downtown, developed the idea in consultation with neighboring business owners who worry that people are deterred from going there by safety concerns.
"I walk to The [Jacksonville] Landing at night to see clients, and I often get harassed," Marques said.
The wireless camera system he has proposed offers advantages compared with a hardwired system, he said. The cameras are more readily deployable and aren't subject to having their wires cut. Also, such a network is more scalable; extra cameras can be added or removed as needed.
The cameras can swivel and zoom in from hundreds of feet away with sharp resolution. Their images could be called up on police car computers or even on handheld devices given to officers.
Marques would install monitoring equipment for the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office's exclusive use.
The system proposed could also include a gunshot locator system. If a gun is fired, nearby cameras would turn to the sound and pinpoint the location on a map.
Marques declined to say how much the system will cost, but he has pitched it to the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office on the premise that it will be funded privately and turned over to the JSO to operate.
The proposed funding mechanism involves soliciting sponsorships from businesses for one or more cameras. Signs could be affixed to each camera stating which company is supporting its installation and maintenance.
"It's kind of like adopt-a-highway, only for cameras," Marques said.
In addition, the proposal suggests the possibility of being able to embed a watermark of a sponsoring company's logo on the output from each camera. So if a camera detects activity that is aired on television news or reproduced in print, the watermark would be included.
Marques, with help from La Cena Ristorante owner Jerry Moran, is looking for a company to underwrite a pilot project involving eight cameras. If that is successful, he envisions adding 86 cameras.

Such a network would have more than twice as many cameras as the hardwired system the city has around the sports complex. Those cameras are used mainly to monitor traffic during sporting events and events at Metropolitan Park.
A system geared for public safety would require different training for officers assigned to monitor it, said JSO Chief Mark Richardson, chief of community affairs and special events.
Street-level view
Moran, who is chairman of the Sheriff's Advisory Council for the sector that includes Downtown, has high hopes that such a system will deter activities such as panhandling, indecency, criminal vagrancy, drug dealing and vehicle vandalism.
"I'm at street level," Moran said. "I see this all the time."
But he's seen such activity reduced since he began turning his restaurant's cameras toward the street.
"It seemed to be effective," he said. "I thought a video surveillance system for Downtown would be a good idea."
Others agree.
"I think cameras would provide an extra level of security, absolutely," said Terry Lorince, executive director of Downtown Vision Inc. "I see it as part of a long-term strategy."
Although statistics show Downtown is among the city's safest areas with respect to violent crime, it has an issue with "nuisance activities" that, for many, create a feeling of being unsafe, Lorince said.
So far, Sheriff John Rutherford "finds the concept very interesting and promising," said Lauri-Ellen Smith, special assistant to the sheriff.

Rutherford is encouraged by the idea of a public-private partnership to fund the cameras, Smith said. "He greatly appreciates this group coming forward with a proposal."
At the same time, the proposal will require a lot of due diligence to sort through issues such as integrating the technology, allocating resources, monitoring and system maintenance.
"The devil is in the details. If you're going to do it, you have to do it well," Smith said. "It's definitely going to be explored and carefully researched."
One issue the sheriff's office will likely have to vet is concern about privacy.
The American Civil Liberties Union has expressed concerns about the increasing prevalence of video surveillance on city streets and other public places. The organization breaks its case against video surveillance into four categories: questionable effectiveness, susceptibility to abuse, lack of limits or controls on use and a chilling effect on public life.
A 2002 review by the British Home Office of 22 prior studies in the U.S. and the U.K. regarding video surveillance concluded it had little or no effect on crime in downtown or public transportation settings. Nor did it seem to deter violent crime. It did, however, show some correlation to a reduction of vehicle-related crimes in parking lots.
'Surveillance monster'
The ACLU worries video surveillance systems will be abused -- for personal, voyeuristic or illegal purposes or for discriminatory targeting -- as a result of flawed policies or oversight. Likewise, it worries the use of video surveillance will expand unchecked: "Because there's no clear consensus on where we draw the line on surveillance to protect American values, [it] is in danger of evolving into a surveillance monster."
Lastly, the ACLU worries people will stop being themselves in public for fear of attracting attention.
Moran said such concerns are not an issue when the system is viewed as a means for police to cover more public space, noting that long ago police departments would station officers in towers with views of several blocks.
"Civil libertarians have nothing to fear," Moran said. "One cop will do the work of 10. We'll have a cop on every street corner. That's when Downtown will flourish."

[jaxhater]

Flea brains, I'm lol for the rest of the day from that one, Midway.
Can't we just go back to the days where everybody was a bunch of snitches.
Cameras, downtown.
Now we will all have proof that the downtown is over, we can just look at the video.
I propose we put cameras up around First Baptist so we can figure out who the weirdos are.
They won't mind because their perfect.
These dumbasses in the city goverment can't even find enough money to pay for basics and now find money so they can watch the homeless crap, piss and talk to trees.
This is just dumb,  like freedumb.
But you never know, maybe we'll catch us some of them terrorists or a street pooper.
Flea brains! lol