CCTV and Public Safety

The first is that most public safety CCTV operations remain focused on reactive processes. CCTV cameras now boast many advanced features, and the video footage they capture is usually recorded and archived – but is only subjected
to analysis if warranted by reports of an incident, after the event. There’s a stark contrast with the social media sentiment monitoring conducted by many organisations – both public and private sector – which is increasingly comprehensive,
AI-enabled, detailed and real-time. This means the CCTV device remains largely a “black box”, producing data that’s only pulled out from the archive for review after the event if something has happened.

The second – related – issue is that manual interventions still tend to dominate CCTV operations. A lack of automation means that most real-time monitoring and supervision of CCTV content is still carried out by teams of humans sitting in control rooms, watching content and monitoring other sources such as sound sensors, and then reporting back on what they’re seeing and hearing to determine what the public safety response should be.

People are also used to conduct post-incident analysis, trawling through many hours of footage and sound recordings from different cameras and sensors to establish what happened.

This approach is slow and resource intensive, with the result that the time-lag between an incident taking place and
a human accessing and reviewing the footage can be hours, but more likely days or weeks. This means the current approach is barely feasible for an agency covering a major city – and will become less so in the future, as more video sources come online from the likes of transport networks, shopping centres and citizens’ own video recordings.

The third challenge for today’s public safety CCTV systems is that their ability to share data across functions or other organisations is very limited.

The ability to transfer video evidence seamlessly between different public safety agencies and other participants in the ecosystem delivers many benefits.

These include dramatic time saving and better intelligence from bringing disparate footage together. But historically CCTV information has been stored in discrete network video drives or on physical tapes or CDs, meaning sharing it is difficult, slow and highly labor-intensive. Taking a large city as an example, this issue is underlined by the sheer range of CCTV systems likely to be operating at once – owned and run not just by police, but also by local authorities and transport operators on the public service side, as well as by citizens, third party operators and facilities management companies on the private sector side.

All of these systems can produce data that could benefit public safety if shared in a controlled and permissioned way.