From: spike66 (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 23:50:29 MDT
Extropians, if you are tired of this thread, please skip to the last
paragraph, thanks. s
Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> From a security perspective, cameras are a "monitor" device, not a
> "prevention" device. They don't prevent any crimes. They only show a
> crime after it is in progress. To turn it into a "detection" device,
> it would need full-time monitoring, alarm systems to a response team,
> and people stationed close enough to intercede before the quick event
> was over.
I am surprised at how this surveillance concept is still
being systematically misunderstood by nearly everyone
who has commented on it. Perhaps I didn't adequately
explain what I have in mind.
> Having a videotape of a masked gunman walking away with money may
> not be helpful after the fact.
If we had enough overlapping timestamped video, the cops
could calmly drive to the place where the perp is hiding,
scoop up his ass and throw it in the slammer. We would
have continuous video of the same guy from the time of
the crime to the present. The mask is irrelevant. The video
is *extremely* useful after the fact, assuming we have enough of it.
> It is not clear to me that such devices would have any provable effect
> on "prevention".
If the criminal is no longer free after his first crime, then
such a system would provide prevention of the second crime.
> I personally don't believe in the concept of "deterrence".
If most criminal careers lasted for exactly one crime, the
deterrence effect would be enormous.
> Most criminals are too arrogant or stupid to really calculate their
> chances of being caught and choosing their venue accordingly.
It doesn't matter if he is stupid and arrogant, as long
as we can catch the bastard after his first crime.
> I am not sure that video cameras in banks or convenience stores has
> had much effect historically.
Because there aren't enough cameras. We see all this
video on "Worlds Scariest Police Videos" of the perps
doing some evil deed, then getting away, never to be
seen again. But a decade from now, that same program may
show the perp doing the deed, then another video shot
from a different angle 10 seconds later, then another and
another until half an hour later the perp is surrounded,
peacefully captured and not heard from for a long time.
Assume a violent criminal gets caught 20% of
the time, so a typical criminal career includes a
number of crimes. If we got that average up to
80 or 90%, there would be far fewer crimes committed
before the perp is apprehended, typically one.
Furthermore the remaining uncaught would likely go
into some other line of work.
It occurred to me that with the appropriate lenses,
fisheyes, there wouldn't need to be all that many
cameras, since the resolution would not need to
be all that great. Two interconnected timestamped
webcams can be triangulated to insure they are
looking at the same perp. The only requirement
is that their fields of view overlap.
This whole notion of surveillance as a crime fighting
tool might be too limiting. I posted earlier the
notion of using it to find meteorites, but what about
other scientific uses, such as studying unusual phenomena,
such as the old question about animals acting weird
before an earthquake, or non-periodic geysers, or
wildlife migrations, or the mating habits of armadillos,
or rockfalls, avalanches, flash floods and other things
that must happen somewhere but that one seldom sees.
This entire planet is poised to evolve collective mechanized
vision that does not blink or miss a thing. Our current
paltry 12 billion human eyes we now have is clearly
insufficient to observe enough to understand everything.
spike
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