"Not the Usual Suspects": A Study of Factors Reducing the Effectiveness of CCTV

Previous research on the effectiveness of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) has focused on critically assessing police and government claims that CCTV is effective in reducing crime. This paper presents a field study that investigates the relationship between CCTV system design and the performance of operator tasks. We carried out structured observations and interviews with 13 managers and 38 operators at 13 CCTV control rooms. A number of failures were identified, including the poor configuration of technology, poor quality video recordings, and a lack of system integration. Stakeholder communication was poor, and there were too many cameras and too few operators. These failures have been previously identified by researchers; however, no design improvements have been made to control rooms in the last decade. We identify a number of measures to improve operator performance, and contribute a set of recommendations for security managers and practitioners. Security Journal (2010) 23, 134-154. doi:10.1057/sj.2008.2; published online 6 October 200

Confronting Criminal Law’s Violence: The Possibilities of Unfinished Alternatives

Confronting criminal law’s violence calls for an openness to unfinished alternatives — a willingness to engage in partial, in process, incomplete reformist efforts that seek to displace conventional criminal law administration as a primary mechanism for social order maintenance. But despite all indications that the status quo in U.S. criminal law administration is profoundly dysfunctional — an institutional manifestation of the deepest pathologies in our society — contemporary criminal law reform efforts and scholarship focus almost exclusively on relatively limited modifications to the status quo. These modifications may well render criminal law administration more humane, but fail to substitute alternative institutions or approaches to realize social order maintenance goals. In particular, these reformist efforts continue to rely on conventional criminal regulatory approaches to a wide array of social concerns, with all of their associated violence: on criminalization, policing, arrest, prosecution, incarceration, probation, and parole. Thus, even as these reformist approaches may offer substantial benefits, they remain wed to institutions that perpetrate criminal law’s violence and to limited temporal and imaginative horizons. By contrast, this essay explores a series of criminal law reform alternatives that offer more fundamental substitutes for criminal law administration. More specifically, this essay focuses on the possibilities of alternatives to criminal case processing that substitute for the order-maintaining functions currently attempted through criminal law enforcement. These alternatives hold the potential to draw into service separate institutions and mechanisms from those typically associated with criminal law administration. Further, these alternatives enlist on more equal footing and invite feedback and input from persons subject to criminal law enforcement. Importantly, this latter subset of reform alternatives is decidedly unfinished, partial, in process. I will argue that this unfinished quality ought not to be denied as an embarrassment or flaw, but instead should be embraced as a source of critical strength and possibility. In this dimension, this essay is a preliminary call for more attention on the part of legal scholars and criminal law reform advocates to unfinished partial substitutes for the order-maintaining work performed by criminal law administration — a call to attend further to as yet incomplete reformist alternatives that may portend less violent and more self-determined ways of achieving some measure of social order and collective peace. I begin to develop this argument by drawing, in particular, on the work of the Norwegian social theorist and prison abolitionist Thomas Mathiesen

Usability and Trust in Information Systems

The need for people to protect themselves and their assets is as old as humankind. People's physical safety and their possessions have always been at risk from deliberate attack or accidental damage. The advance of information technology means that many individuals, as well as corporations, have an additional range of physical (equipment) and electronic (data) assets that are at risk. Furthermore, the increased number and types of interactions in cyberspace has enabled new forms of attack on people and their possessions. Consider grooming of minors in chat-rooms, or Nigerian email cons: minors were targeted by paedophiles before the creation of chat-rooms, and Nigerian criminals sent the same letters by physical mail or fax before there was email. But the technology has decreased the cost of many types of attacks, or the degree of risk for the attackers. At the same time, cyberspace is still new to many people, which means they do not understand risks, or recognise the signs of an attack, as readily as they might in the physical world. The IT industry has developed a plethora of security mechanisms, which could be used to mitigate risks or make attacks significantly more difficult. Currently, many people are either not aware of these mechanisms, or are unable or unwilling or to use them. Security experts have taken to portraying people as "the weakest link" in their efforts to deploy effective security [e.g. Schneier, 2000]. However, recent research has revealed at least some of the problem may be that security mechanisms are hard to use, or be ineffective. The review summarises current research on the usability of security mechanisms, and discusses options for increasing their usability and effectiveness

Can we ID from CCTV? Image quality in digital CCTV and face identification performance

CCTV is used for an increasing number Of purposes, and the new generation of digital systems can be tailored to serve a wide range of security requirements. However, configuration decisions are often made without considering specific task requirements, e.g. the video quality needed for reliable person identification. Our Study investigated the relationship between video quality and the ability of untrained viewers to identify faces from digital CCTV images. The task required 80 participants to identify 64 faces belonging to 4 different ethnicities. Participants compared face images taken from a high quality photographs and low quality CCTV stills, which were recorded at 4 different video quality bit rates (32, 52, 72 and 92 Kbps). We found that the number of correct identifications decreased by 12 (similar to 18%) as MPEG-4 quality decreased from 92 to 32 Kbps, and by 4 (similar to 6%) as Wavelet video quality decreased from 92 to 32 Kbps. To achieve reliable and effective face identification, we recommend that MPEG-4 CCTV systems should be used over Wavelet, and video quality should not be lowered below 52 Kbps during video compression. We discuss the practical implications of these results for security, and contribute a contextual methodology for assessing CCTV video quality

Autonomous real-time surveillance system with distributed IP cameras

An autonomous Internet Protocol (IP) camera based object tracking and behaviour identification system, capable of running in real-time on an embedded system with limited memory and processing power is presented in this paper. The main contribution of this work is the integration of processor intensive image processing algorithms on an embedded platform capable of running at real-time for monitoring the behaviour of pedestrians. The Algorithm Based Object Recognition and Tracking (ABORAT) system architecture presented here was developed on an Intel PXA270-based development board clocked at 520 MHz. The platform was connected to a commercial stationary IP-based camera in a remote monitoring station for intelligent image processing. The system is capable of detecting moving objects and their shadows in a complex environment with varying lighting intensity and moving foliage. Objects moving close to each other are also detected to extract their trajectories which are then fed into an unsupervised neural network for autonomous classification. The novel intelligent video system presented is also capable of performing simple analytic functions such as tracking and generating alerts when objects enter/leave regions or cross tripwires superimposed on live video by the operator

Community Self Help

This paper advocates controlling crime through a greater emphasis on precautions taken not by individuals, but by communities. The dominant battles in the literature today posit two central competing models of crime control. In one, the standard policing model, the government is responsible for the variety of acts that are necessary to deter and prosecute criminal acts. In the other, private self-help, public law enforcement is largely supplanted by providing incentives to individuals to self-protect against crime. There are any number of nuances and complications in each of these competing stories, but the literature buys into this binary matrix

CCTV Surveillance System, Attacks and Design Goals

Closed Circuit Tele-Vision surveillance systems are frequently the subject of debate. Some parties seek to promote their benefits such as their use in criminal investigations and providing a feeling of safety to the public. They have also been on the receiving end of bad press when some consider intrusiveness has outweighed the benefits. The correct design and use of such systems is paramount to ensure a CCTV surveillance system meets the needs of the user, provides a tangible benefit and provides safety and security for the wider law-abiding public. In focusing on the normative aspects of CCTV, the paper raises questions concerning the efficiency of understanding contemporary forms of ‘social ordering practices’ primarily in terms of technical rationalities while neglecting other, more material and ideological processes involved in the construction of social order. In this paper, a 360-degree view presented on the assessment of the diverse CCTV video surveillance systems (VSS) of recent past and present in accordance with technology. Further, an attempt been made to compare different VSS with their operational strengths and their attacks. Finally, the paper concludes with a number of future research directions in the design and implementation of VSS

A Design Methodology of an Embedded Motion-Detecting Video Surveillance System

Malaysia urbanization rate has been growing fast due to rapid development and modernization (Economy Planning Unit, 2015) (World Bank, 2015). With the fast growing urban population, the property crimes associated also rises at an alarming rate (United Nations Human Settlements Program, 2007) ( Mohit Mohammad Abdul, Elsawahli H. Mohamed Hassan, 2015) (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2015). Video surveillance system is one of the trusted and efficient security systems to protect people and property against criminal (Varij Ken, 2015). Three problems and issues regarding current video surveillance system are functionality, flexibility and efficiency. The aim of this project is to design and develop an embedded motion detecting video surveillance system and to produce a functioning prototype as the final result to solve these problems. In order to achieve the aim of this project, three objectives are set to be attained. These objectives are to design and develop a motion detection algorithm based on OpenCV library functions using camera as sensor, to process and execute the algorithm using an embedded micro-computer and to compare its processing performance with a PC and to enable wireless user alert using LAN and internet connection. The first objective is achieved as the motion detection algorithm designed and developed based on background subtraction method using camera sensor and openCV library function is proven to functioning well in detecting for motion changes. The algorithm performs successfully both in BeagleBone Black module and PC and is able to deliver outputs required for embedded motion detection video surveillance system. The second objective is achieved as BeagleBone Black (BBB) module, a micro-computer embedded system is used as main processor for the embedded motion-detecting video surveillance system. The BBB module is able to process and execute the motion detection algorithm designed with image processing functions from OpenCV library. The third objective is achieved as embedded motion-detecting video surveillance system is equipped with wireless user alert function using local area network and internet connection. The system is able to send real-time alert to the user via email attached with the image captured and detected as a threat by the syste