Has High Tech Cut Crime?
Posted by Edmond Geary on 07-01-2010
Violent crime in East Orange, New Jersey, has fallen by two-thirds since 2003. Why? Officials in East Orange believe it is because of the high-tech gizmos they have installed around the city, including gunshot detection systems and software that analyzes crime data
instantaneously.
Jose Cardero has been the police director since 2004. Before that he was in charge of New York City Police Departments anti-gang program. For East Orange, he developed a database in his spare time. That database enabled the police department to follow and analyze
crime data without waiting for paper reports to be collated. The network cost $1.4 million. Of that, $1.1 million has come from grants and forfeiture funds.
Then the city added upgrades, including a wireless computer system for all police patrol cars, video surveillance in high-crime areas, community patrol system for residents to report crimes via text messages, a grid system showing the location of patrol cars, and a gunshot detection system that tracks the source of shootings. East Orange police claim the response time will be measured in seconds.
The sensors that are to be installed work in a system with surveillance cameras which are to designed to see find crimes and potential crimes by recognizing certain behavior as it is viewed: someone raises a fist at another person; a car slowing down as it approaches a person
walking on a deserted street at night. The system is designed to record and digest into its database actions observed by the sensors, be analyzed, and then instructed that certain behavior is a crime. When the surveillance cameras observe those actions again, the system alerts that the designated crime is in progress.
Digisensory Technologies, an Australian company that makes the sensors, says the sensors will always recognize the behavior it has been told is a crime. Once the camera sees and the sensors recognize the behavior, an alert is sent to the police department’s nerve center, where a police officer can take a closer look at the pictures to verify whether a crime is actually in progress and a computer program sends the information to a laptop in a patrol car near the scene of the observed behavior.
Cardero wants criminals to know they are being watched. He believes publicity about his technological program is good for that reason, as well as making residents feel safer. He believes that the real value to the technological program is its impact on those who are deterred from
committing a crime from fear of detection.
The program is not without its critics. Dennis Kenney is a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who is skeptical about the program because the sensors can pick up so many innocent actions, like lining up at an ATM, that the system could be overloaded.
He suggests monitors would be constantly watching every ATM because there would be so many false positives they would have to screen out so many false positives, and then, to make up for it,
monitors would have to screen out so many things it would defeat the purpose.
Peter Scharf, a professor of public health at Tulane University, is another sceptic. He suggests there is no evidence that increasing the rate of information going to patrol cars will make significant difference unless the cars are driving faster. He co-authored a study of gunshot
detection systems used in Hampton and Newport News, Virginia. However, Scharf points to the case of snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo as an example of how sensors could have taken existing pieces of data, such as car description, pattern of behavior, type of weapon, and alerted police to imminent shootings.
East Orange offers a recent case to tout their system. When a car was reported stolen, the pursuing officer of a stolen vehicle automatically activated a virtual perimeter of cameras in the area, providing other patrol cars the information they used to make a prompt arrest of the suspect.