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Britain installs automatic road surveillance
Britain's growing network of urban CCTV cameras is now being extended to provide surveillance of all major roads in England and Wales.
Although police are operating the cameras, authorities view the benefits as sufficiently extensive to directly involve the Department for Transport and Highways Agency in planning and developing the overall strategy.
The new road cameras are all fitted for automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) and while cars flash by at up to 160 km/h, the cameras can check the credentials of up to 3000 vehicles an hour - and provide information on each one in just 1.5 seconds.
In those one-and-a-half seconds, the ANPR crosschecks information held on half-a-dozen local and national data banks and sounds an alarm if the data suggests the vehicle may have been involved in a crime - including the non-payment of vehicle tax.
The ANPR cameras are being installed in mobile vans and a selected number of police cars.
If the alarm goes off, the ANPR operator can tell a nearby police car to intercept the offending motorist.
"The aim is to deny criminals the use of the roads," said Chief Constable Frank Whiteley who heads the working group introducing ANPR.
ANPR is not without its critics. Motoring groups and civil liberty organisations have all challenged the concept.
"Real criminals have cars that can't be traced anyway," says Nigel Humphries of the Association of British Drivers.
He believed one of the main purposes of the system is to catch "road-tax delinquents". John Davies of Privacy International is anxious about the privacy implications. It's like weeding with a bulldozer," he says. (See too "Will hi-tech cars become tomorrow's police?" TransScan June 2005 p10.)
But despite the critics ANPR trials suggest the cameras can help identify a lot of crime. During 12-month of testing, ANPR helped police intercept 180,545 vehicles - and arrest:
- 2263 people for theft and burglary,
- 3324 people for driving offences - including driving while disqualified,
- 1107 people for drug offences, and
- 1386 people for car theft.
As well as recovering 1152 stolen vehicles worth $18.5 million, the police also caught 20,290 motorists committing a variety of driving offences including not wearing a seat belt and using a mobile phone while driving.
The scan also showed:
Looking for trouble
Until now CCTV cameras have recorded everything they are pointed at. They have not been capable of actually "looking for trouble".
But new technology developed in the UK has just given street TV the ability to spot "suspicious behaviour", zoom in on the incident - and sound an alarm.
Stuart Thompson, managing director of Viseum, the company behind the development, says the new CCTVs use "content analysis" to identify anything out of the ordinary.
"Intelligent surveillance is based on measuring various physical parameters such as size, shape, speed, time, movement, density and location of a particular scene and compare it with a pre-selectable surveillance profile," he says.
Although the cameras would help stop a terrorist attack, they could also identify non-speeding, dangerous drivers.
