5G can help us spy on West Midlands with AI CCTV, giggles UK.gov The West Midlands is to become the first UK urban 5G testbed area at a cost of up to £50m – with one use for the new tech being China-style AI-powered CCTV cameras with automated facial recognition, according to the government. The Urban Connected Communities Project, UK.gov-speak for "the latest wheeze we're tipping cash into …
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It won't work anywhere, regardless of clothing. Look at London, with its zillion CCTV cameras, yet the local plods seem incapable of resolving the wave of murders, stabbings and moped crime.
And the important point is about the "CC" of CCTV. The vast majority of public sector security cameras are connected to manned control rooms, and it's still ineffective. So simply linking up bus, train and selected private camera networks via 5G will change nothing.
I fear those are not the 'crimes' they're meant to find.
I would agree. Policing seems to be in crisis. Cuts to police numbers aren't helping, but there's a more pressing issue that the concept of abiding by the law is losing currency. The vast rise in moped and knife crimes is clear evidence that there's a problem of people choosing not to obey the law. Meanwhile the chief constable round my way (Anthony Bangham) continues his misguided campaign to abolish current enforcement guidelines so he can prosecute speeders for 1 mph over the limit. Which might be acceptable if he didn't have all manner of unsolved crime on his force's doorstep, no control over the growing county lines drug trade, a "poor" report from the inspectorate of constabulary, and a festering Rotheram-like sex abuse scandal in Telford where his force have been serially and enduringly incompetent, and there's clear indications of coverups and denial.
Policing (and the rest of the criminal justice system) appears to be transforming towards a tax-raising, technology obsessed bureaucracy that is ineffectual in reducing crime, with "policing by consent" an idea that no longer matters.
Policing by consent doesn't seem to be relevant any more. The police on the street no longer have the trust of most of the general public (the 'seniors' at HQ lost the plot a long time ago). Here are a few more reasons why (in addition to the ones you mention) - not all of them particularly recent:
* Birmingham pub bombings/Birmingham 6
* Hillsborough
* Steven Lawrence
* Ian Tomlinson
* "the war on drugs"
* "the war against terror"
* dubious long term undercover policing of legitimate protests and organisations (Mark Kennedy/Stone and others)
* The role of the police in the allegations against:
** Cliff Richard
** Jimmy Saville
** Ted Heath
Etc.
Strange days.
Anybody seen anything of Charles Farr lately?
https://www.gov.uk/government/people/charles-farr
I'm not convinced about "the police have lost all trust" meme that a minority pushes.
Firstly, those examples? So long ago that the people responsible are either retired or dead in practically all cases. Most police officers serving today hadn't even been born when many of those offenses took place.
Secondly, i'd highlight that the same people who scream that "da police are pigs dude" are as a rule the first to call the police when they are attacked by some nut hopped up on drugs, or get offended by unpleasant Facebook or Twitter messages.
The reason that the police on the street don't have any trust is because you don't see police on the street anymore, unless they are responding to a 999 call because they are so tied up with meaningless drivel like the aforementioned nonsense Facebook/twitter messages that people call them with, or they are tied up with absurd amounts of paperwork. And yes, I think that filling out 17 different forms for arresting somebody is fairly describable as absurd.
Police officers tend to join up because they want to run around catching criminals, not spending >70% of their time doing basic admin work.
@Peter2
I will join you to some extent regarding police trust. The Police I come across on almost every shift I work ( a busy A/E Dept. ) do seem to be worthy of our trust.
I have yet to see one giving any sort of abuse ( verbally or physically ) to anyone under their 'care' irrespective of the type of abuse I have seen them subject to. The only despair I suffer is fact that they brought the drugged up / drunken / violent / abusive knob-heads to us in the first place!
I think the real problem begins as people of any profession start to enter the heady upper echelons. I suggest that this is the point they become divorced from the reality of the job they initially entered.
Once insulated from the cause and effect of the sharp end of life, great proclamations give them a feel good factor despite them no longer being rooted in reality.
The French have become pretty good of late at issuing speeding tickets as a 'cash cow' for 1mph above the speed limit as well as recently lowering the rural limits to 80km/h.
French Cameras also operate in both directions (front and rear facing), unlike the UK. Many of the rural French cameras have been upgraded in their cabinet to operate both directions but importantly, the signage hasn't. i.e. it will now catch you when it's located on the opposite side of the road (on your left in France, as well as the right, as you pass it).
Often it's a camera that was originally located to catch driver approaching a bend in the one direction, but in the new direction, the driver has already taken the bend and is accelerating away from the bend along a long straight, i.e. cash cow (and no genuine reason to monitor speed).
In the UK, HADECS 3 Cameras on the M4 at Bristol send out NIPs for 81Mph, ten a penny. The smart motorway gantries with the Camera tend to be 10-20mph lower than the gantries before and after (especially if wet) and overnight during roadworks the camera will be often be set at 20mph, with a 50mph limit on the gantry before and after, often it seems, just to check you're awake (not a workman in sight).
We might not have 71mph prosecutions yet, but Highways Agency/GoSafe are using every trick in the book to get you prosecuted for very minor misdemeanours, which are nothing to do with real road safety.
The proliferation of new 20mph limits overnight on motorways (linked to HADECS 3) are just plain dangerous.
I've nearly a had 40-tonne lorry hit me in back in these 20mph roadwork limits because some drivers are unaware there is a HADECS 3 in place or just not fully aware 'dosey' at that time.
I don't take kindly to being forced to drive at 20mph for no reason on a motorway, just so they can potentially generate head clipping revenue at the expense of my safety. Workman in lanes dropping cones - fine, but there never are.
Can you imagine the throughput of the gateway needed? It'd soon be saturated. The potentials for this and the new UKESN system are great, IF it can be made to work. Maybe in 5/10 years time this will be a possibility, it certainly won't be happening any time soon.
Also, what area of Birmingham are they hoping to cover? It's quite a bit place.
there aren't enough police to respond to all incidents even now. Increasing the number of incidents that the police are expected to respond to would probably have little effect.
Many years ago, before Austerity was a thing and I was a local councilor, I was shown around the council's CCTV facility. The operators showed us some of the local ne'er-do-wells, who were well known by sight to the operators for their frequent dreadful behaviour, and who helpfully gave the camera the finger. It was explained that even when the operators saw people whom they knew had outstanding arrest warrants against them, unless it was a Friday or Saturday night there were usually insufficient police available to do anything about it. So they didn't even bother notifying the police. Austerity is now government policy, and so there are even less police, and in fact the council-funded cameras, and their control centre, have gone.
there aren't enough police to respond to all incidents even now
No, and if the truth were known, some councils or their agents that allegedly provide a CCTV "service" are also understaffed. My car was significantly vandalised but was parked over the road from a CCTV mast. I contacted the Police who stated that they "didn't have time to look through hours of CCTV footage", and the council sheepishly admitted that "many cameras aren't switched, and those that are on only have the recordings stored for a couple of days, and they didn't have the staff to check for me". I offered to go in and check the recordings myself but was denied. The whole thing is a joke.
Since 2010, the government has been continually giving people more incentive to turn to crime via cuts to benefits and services while simultaneously cutting the ability to deal with that crime via cuts to the police, courts and prisons.
Eventually a tipping point will be reached, and it looks like it has.
Assuming that mere punters will get to use 5G (for looking at things rather than being looked at, I have to wonder how far the average data plan will go.
We're constantly bombarded with TV ads breathlessly proclaiming .. and you get FIVE WHOLE GIGABYTES for your £20. Well whooppee! That'll last around half a day at 5G speeds and no doubt you'll get the option to buy extra overpriced add-on gigabytes - no doubt as to who the winners and losers are!
Well whooppee! That'll last around half a day at 5G speeds
I don't think that's the point of the proposition. My current car could (in theory) do my morning commute in about seven minutes allowing for acceleration and deceleration times. On the other hand other road users might feel that me whistling through at a peak speed above 135 mph was not really on. Likewise, I'm on a 200 Mbps VM connection, but I know that I never hit that other than on a multi-thread speed test.
Even if they don't continuously max-out the capabilities of what we now have, I suspect that nobody is queueing up to go back to the days of 14,400 baud modems, 3G mobile data, and cars that couldn't exceed 80.
It used to be the case that we'd object to over-enthusiastic police or government powers on the grounds that, although the government of the time promised to use them responsibly, some future government might not, so we should ensure they were properly controlled.
We now have that future government. They can no longer be trusted to have the public's best interests at heart, and we should not permit this sort of overreach.
Initial plans for what to do with the new 5G network are said to include medical consultations being carried out over video link, "connected ambulances" fitted with video conferencing facilities for paramedics to get advice from hospital-based specialists, and live streaming of CCTV from buses.
All of them are valid use cases I guess, but they sound very similar to the use cases that were offered a few years ago as arguments for having 4G. If a 4G network is capable of supporting these tasks, is it really worth spending that many millions of pounds on 5G?
The AI angle is a new one, but not really relevant to whether the network is 4G or 5G. The clever AI stuff happens at one end or the other of a <x>G link, not on the network itself.
The whole panopticon concept mentioned in the article doesn't really work in practice though, does it? I mean the whole "you could be watched so don't do it" doesn't really discourage people to break the law, for example CCTV coverage doesn't really stop crime taking place in the areas, right? And speed cameras used to be hidden (as a supposed "deterrant") until a concerted effort to show that this doesn't stop rule-breakers breaking the rules of the road, right?
It's worth remembering Bentham only intended this to be for convicted criminals. It would seem that's changed lately so the government now thinks we're all guilty of something, if only thinking they're simultaneously totalitarian and as useless as a fishnet condom.
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