Daily Post 2992
VIDEO SURVEILLANCE ROADMAP
While the world is bursting at its seams with deepfake videos and generative AI tools that provide you with the capability to interact/converse or talk to video. The nature of possibilities it throws up for intelligence, law enforcement and investigation would be as much as you can professionally imagine and have the guts and gumption to extract out of it. The tech is right here, the ability to execute can be another issue. The public domain CCTV owned and operated by police and governments across cities are struggling at a totally different level, whereas at every level it is claimed that everything is in place.
If everything were to be as projected or being at a level the common man is made to believe, the quality of policing in the country would be at least ten to hundred times better, with drudgery going down considerably. Currently, we are still at a stage where we were a decade back, to get the recorded videos and use them during investigation, some successful, some unsuccessful, depending on the quality of the video, the analytics tools used and the expertise of the technician in question. There are times, where the videos are also not forthcoming for a variety of reasons, and it has to be managed with publicly sourced videos.
While this helps at the times of crisis, it has also allowed the police and government, to escape from a closer scrutiny of their video surveillance mechanism put in place and whether it is improving or otherwise, to serve its purpose. It being in tune with the cutting-edge technology and serving police’s multifarious requirements is primordial. Have we been able to deliver on the preventive, monitoring and real time interventions of various types and high value analytics of critical importance? We start with a simple example; CCTV interventions at critical locations in the police stations, as directed by the higher courts of the country? Quite a few times, courts found video footage missing and had nothing to fall back on to substantiate or otherwise, in cases of custodial violence. The status and that of the video footage audit remains unknown.
On the preventive side, the gains achieved have been a matter of perception, based on what the police and people have to say. The manner in which prevention is being done with video surveillance is still a pipedream; someone in preparation of a crime or a known suspect on the prowl. How many absconders have been nabbed using the public CCTVs or have we even tried doing it? Can we run any face search nationally? Real time interventions build a nature of confidence that can take law enforcement places. An overspeeding driver nabbed within minutes, which video surveillance can certainly enable, should become a matter of routine. Nobody should dare overspeed. The Pune Porsche case is a live example of the sad state of our video surveillance. Can we not even pull out vehicles without valid registration from our roads? Automated number plate recognition supposedly is all around.
SILOED INEFFICIENCY IN LARGE NUMBER OF AREAS, CANNOT BE SOLVED BY MECHANICAL INSTALLATION OF TECHNOLOGY, HOWEVER MUCH WELL PROVEN IT MIGHT BE, ELSEWHERE!
Sanjay Sahay