New Orleans dumping crime camera surveilance!

[thewayne]

In seven years, New Orleans' crime camera program has yielded six indictments: three for crimes caught on video and three for bribes and kickbacks a vendor is accused of paying a former city official to sell the cameras to City Hall.

In 2004, they claimed that the cameras resulted in a 57% reduction in murders in a public housing development, turns out the sample size was ridiculously skewed. Basically it's been a fiasco and has resulted in the federal conviction of their former IT "whiz kid". One huge mistake that they made, tech-wise, was that the cameras were wireless. That takes a lot of bandwidth, and wireless bandwidth isn't that great. It was not properly deployed, it had bad tech, it had ridiculously expensive tech, and they were easily avoided.

So it's really nice to see a major municipality abandon them, it would be nice to see somewhere like London dump 'em. They say that in London you will be photographed over 200 times a day on surveillance cameras.

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/10/new_orleans_crime_camera_progr.html

Comments

[silveradept]

I'm actually surprised that someone decided to scrap a bad program because it was provably bad, rather than getting swamped by some special interest.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

When you get down to it, it's special interests that set up such programs. Either it's terrorism or "won't someone think of the children!" or the "War on Drugs". Or some permutation of all three. And when they've convicted their former IT guru of taking bribes from the vendor, then there's not that much to support keeping the program when it's been proven ineffective.

[silveradept]

Oh, I see. So they didn't even have a fig leaf to hide behind to keep it going. Well, kudos to whomever engineered that nexus of events.