If San Francisco Ruled the World

Posted on January 12, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized |

Witness the chaos that ensued after the City of San Francisco installed a public video surveillance system with the stated goal of crime reduction.

The report was critical of the way a hodgepodge of city agencies combined to administer the program. It said the program had no dedicated manager, and that officers and attorneys got no training on how to view the footage. The clarity of the footage, the study said, could be greatly improved if San Francisco bought more data storage space.

The cameras San Francisco bought and installed for $700,000 are high-resolution but produce so few frames per second that the footage appears choppy, making it difficult to identify things like license plates, the report said.

[From S.F. spy cameras no help in violent crime]

This, however, is my favorite graf in the story:

San Francisco’s camera program is different from other cities’ because, in a nod to privacy concerns, police in San Francisco are not allowed to monitor cameras in real time; investigators must instead order footage after a crime is reported.

So let’s put this in perspective, the cameras are installed in public places where you have no privacy to begin with and the police are not allowed to monitor the cameras because of “privacy concerns” and then have to order video footage they have no training for how to view following a crime but because the frame rate and storage capacity on the system is inadequate, there is often no usable footage to retrieve. Brilliant, let’s definitely use the San Francisco Model for City Government as the ideal for the rest of the country.

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