PUBLIC ON DISPLAY
City a test site for crime-fighting technology. Privacy advocates say personal rights violated.
The Dayton region is becoming a test bed for once-futuristic surveillance technologies with capabilities so advanced law enforcement could use them to instantaneously sift through mountains of video to capture a single moment in time or keep constant watch over an entire city with one camera array.
Already, police in a room at Tech Town in downtown Dayton have the ability to cram hours of video into a single frame, honing in on just the details an investigator wants to see.
Also developed locally, a camera array carried aloft in a plane can stream citizens’ comings and goings across half of Dayton. Its developer calls it “a live version of Google E arth” complete with a rewind button.
Government-funded research and private sector expertise in sensors development, crime analytics and geospatial mapping offer the potential for good-paying jobs as enterprises reach to reap a portion of the billions to be spent in coming years aimed at preventing crime, catching criminals and perhaps stopping the next terrorist attack.
But despite its enormous potential, the technology raises major privacy concerns about who is watching, what they’re watching and how easily such surveillance can be abused.
The new systems give government a powerful tool to aggregate vast quantities of personal data on private citizens who are under no criminal suspicion, said Gary Daniels, chief lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.
“It’s none of the government’s business what doctors you’re going to, what treatment you’re getting, whether you’re going to a gun show, whether you’re going to a political rally,” Daniels said. “That’s none of the government’s business as long as you’re innocent.”
The surveillance industry’s rush to embrace the latest technology also ignores the extent of the threat to Americans, who live in a statistically safer environment than decades ago, according to Daniels.
“They want to give the impression that you really need this technology; it’s necessary,” he said. “We don’t like the idea of government surveilling people everywhere they go all the time simply because they have the means to do so and because they have the desire to do so. We think that’s unconstitutional.”
Crime-solving by algorithm
You may not know what the Footprint Situational Awareness System is. But if you’ve been in downtown Dayton, it may know you — or at least what color shirt you’re wearing and the direction you’re traveling. Soon, systems like Footprint may recognize your face, gait and mannerisms.
Experts say computer algorithms will be called on to thwart a larger share of future crime.
“Anybody who is a victim of crime — heaven forbid it’s a murder or something like that — wants their justice, wants their crime solved, wants their stuff back, wants their property repaired. We want to provide another tool for law officers to be able to do that,” said Larrell Walters of the University of Dayton Research Institute, which helped develop Footprint with $3 million in state Third Frontier funding.
Scenes once fictionalized in crime-fighting movies are being tested by the Dayton Police Department through a downtown network of cameras called the iDayton Project. When video is fed into the system, police investigators can pore through hours of recordings in mere minutes to find a proverbial needle in a haystack of surveillance video.
The iDayton cameras began going up last May on downtown street poles. After some technical glitches, 10 cameras were operational this month with another five installed. The plan calls for a total of 27 cameras, according to Dayton police.
In addition to video, a multitude of data feeds can be ingested into the Footprint system, said Tom Lachey, president of Optica Consulting. Footprint, though, is much more than a high-tech video analysis system, said Lachey, whose company developed the system that evolved into Footprint.
The system provides a comprehensive analysis of reported crimes and maps it to detect patterns. Linkages between dates, times, witnesses and suspects are shown visually. Detailed reports from the searchable data are then pushed out to command staff and cops on the beat.
Other law enforcement agencies will soon be able to purchase the application being beta-tested by Dayton police.
Optica Consulting joined with Beavercreekbased Woolpert Inc. to form Footprint LLC last August. The two are commercializing the technology along with UDRI as a technical development partner. UDRI’s Third Frontier award developed the sensors component, giving the system its video analytics heft. As a condition of the award, 32 jobs must be created by December 2016, Walters said.
The first operational version of Footprint will be released on April 20, according to the company.
“It’s a combination of technologies that doesn’t really exist anywhere else on the market: the aggregation of the video forensics and data analytics, sensor technology,” Lachey said. “I don’t know that anybody else is pulling that all together.”
Explosive growth
Police say technology is one way to stay ahead of criminals while departments everywhere cope with fewer feet on the street.
“When you go from 419 police officers to 324 in four years you’ve got to do something different,” Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl said.
Cameras are fast becoming a fixture wherever people gather. In addition to the iDayton cameras downtown, the Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority has 57 cameras trained on its Wright Stop Plaza downtown and another 80 in high-traffic and passenger waiting areas, according to the RTA. The Ranger Division of Five Rivers MetroParks has seven cameras at RiverScape, said Chief Ranger Mark Hess. Untold hundreds more private cameras keep watch over downtown businesses.
Use of video surveillance is exploding across the globe. From an estimated $12 billion spent worldwide in 2012, the industry could grow to as much as four times that size by 2020, according to a study by the California-based Grand View Research. An ever-increasing share of that market will involve video analytics, or the capability to quickly process and analyze video to detect patterns of behavior or identify individuals.
Cameras have long been trained on everything from roads and bridges to blackjack and craps tables. But video analytics helps eliminate some of the inefficiencies built into many camera systems, namely fatigue.
Humans tasked with monitoring video cameras tend to tire quickly — as early as 20 minutes, studies show. And mistakes multiply depending on how many cameras an individual watches. Observers in one study missed about 60 percent of target events when tested with monitoring nine displays. Subjects did better when monitoring four displays, but they still failed to identify 20 percent of the target events.
“The common theme is everyone seems to be overwhelmed with the amount of data they have at their disposal,” Lachey said. “We need a way to use this vast amount of data more efficiently to be more effective. That’s where Footprint hits the nail on the head.”
The ACLU’s Daniels said technology in the surveillance industry is advancing so rapidly, the public often doesn’t know when its privacy is being violated.
“By the time we get a handle on it and start informing each other and having these discussions, the technology has already lapped us two or three times,” he said.
Mixed results
Despite their widespread use, it’s not clear if surveillance cameras — used primarily as a crimefighting tool — actually reduce crime.
A 2011 study of surveillance systems in Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, D.C., found the impact varied from city to city.
Baltimore reported the most success. Four months after 500 cameras were installed downtown in 2005, total crime incidents within range of the cameras dropped by 25 percent, according to the study.
But Chicago, which had 2,000 cameras in use during the 2007-10 study period, had mixed results, and cameras alone were not found to have had any impact on crime rates in Washington, D.C.
The report, by the Urban Institute Justice Policy Center, said while public surveillance systems were viewed as a useful tool in each of the cities, they were not found to be “a silver bullet.”
Ross McNutt, owner of Persistent Surveillance Systems, the company developing the Google Earth-type aerial system in Dayton, says limited coverage makes groundbased cameras ineffective at catching perpetrators.
McNutt’s system, which uses military-based technology, affixes a camera array to a light aircraft. The array can watch over a 25-square-mile area and transmit rapid-fire still images in real time for police or analysts to observe. Subjects stay in the aerial camera’s view often for hours — long enough to identify their movements, who they interacted with and where their image may have been captured by another camera.
“Ground-based cameras, unless you have tens of thousands of them, have not proven effective,” McNutt said. “The problem is they just don’t solve the crimes.”
McNutt says his system could solve plenty of crimes — if given a chance. However, a tentative agreement between Dayton and Persistent Surveillance was scrubbed in 2013 when it encountered opposition from members of the public and the ACLU.
The company is now pitching its product to other cities.
‘It’s prevention’
Both Biehl, the Dayton police chief, and Hess, who served 29 years with the Dayton department before joining Five Rivers MetroParks, say cameras are an important deterrent even if their true impact can’t be measured.
Officials say it’s too early to know if the iDayton system is making a dent in the crime rate downtown. All categories of reported crime in Dayton’s Central Patrol Operations Division dropped between 2010 and 2014, and continued declining between 2013 and 2014 when the rest of the city showed a slight uptick, Biehl said. But the department assigned more officers downtown during that period and the cameras have been up only since May.
Although Dayton’s detectives have reviewed video using the Footprint system, the 10 operational cameras have yet to capture an event that would assist with a case.
Still, Biehl is a huge advocate of the camera system, saying its biggest impact is as a deterrent to property crime.
“The idea behind cameras is not their value in apprehension or detection, it’s prevention,” he said. “That’s where the primary benefit is. Even if one does not prevent a crime, as a secondary benefit it may help us solve a crime.”
Biehl said letting citizens know the cameras are monitoring public space is a key toward preventing property and other crimes.
Hess said the mere presence of the cameras would cause “any reasonable person” to think twice about committing a criminal act.
“It’s obviously on some criminals’ minds,” he said, “because they will come in and try to destroy a camera.”