Look over Baltimore at night and you'll find it sparkling with flashing blue lights: a cool sheen from the housings of the 225 video surveillance cameras mounted on light poles. The police program, which was started in the city's most crime-ridden neighborhoods in 2005, is now part of a network of 350 security cameras around the city.

That might sound like an impressive number of prying eyes, but it's nothing compared to the unflinching gaze of the more than four million closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras now in place in the United Kingdom, a country that embraced the principle of video surveillance decades ago. London alone is saturated by more than half a million CCTV devices. Many of those cameras were provided by Petards Group, a British company that sells video surveillance systems to casinos, prisons, and local governments in more than forty countries. It's one of the largest and oldest such firms worldwide, and its U.S. subsidiary, Petards, Inc., moved its headquarters to Baltimore in August 2007. "We wanted to be closer to where we believe many of our customers are going to be," says Petards, Inc. president Frank Baitman.

In February, Baitman wrote a Washington Post op-ed that argued—perhaps counterintuitively—for more federal regulation of video surveillance and other forms of electronic oversight. "New surveillance technologies ... are emerging at a dizzying pace. The blurry videotape scenes of convenience store robberies are rapidly being replaced by crystal-clear video digitally recorded on computer hard drives. As the number of cameras watching us grows, the surveillance industry is wrestling with the emerging problem of an overabundance of images and properly controlling their distribution."

Voicing concerns about too many security cameras might seem an odd role for a man in the security camera business, but Baitman has a far-thinking resume. Prior to joining Petards in January 2007, Baitman was the research director of the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto-based think tank that helps large business clients such as Procter & Gamble find ways to use new technology. He holds a master's of public management in international affairs and national security policy from the University of Maryland, College Park, and lives in Roland Park with his wife and son. 



Q So does video surveillance fight crime or just displace it?

A  My personal feeling is if it is done properly—and I think you'd hear this from authorities here in Baltimore—I think it can reduce crime. Video surveillance helps catch the worst of the bad. To have a judge or a jury looking at a video, the guy sitting there can't say, "I didn't do it." Or, "I was at my brother's." 

We had our own little experience [here at Petards]. We've had some problems recently with the cleaning crew. We noticed that we had crumbs [and suspected that] people weren't vacuuming. As you could imagine, we use our office to test a lot of equipment. So we have surveillance running twenty-four hours. Well, guess what? One of my techs ran [the footage], looking for when the cleaning crew was in last night. Lo and behold, he found one of the crew sleeping for an hour in one of the desk chairs.



Q So the message here is that if I'm in a cleaning crew, I wouldn't want to get your building on my regular beat.

A  No. So we took the video to the management company and the manager was speechless. What can you say? There it is. There is the evidence.



Q  Video provides irrefutable proof against the tricks of memory and deceit.

A It does. It's not perfect and there still can be misinterpretations, but it goes a long way toward dealing with the ambiguity or the uncertainty.



Q But back to the argument that it just moves the crime around ...

A  There's no question that it displaces crime. The police know where the crime is. They leave a camera there for a week and they get all they're going to get before they displace the crime. And then the police pull it down.

The interesting thing is that these are not small cameras. You can look right up at them. But criminals will go on about their business anyway, and get caught. It's amazing. We've put cameras up in places where there is illegal dumping going on, in England. You see someone pull up, look around, pull some garbage out of a truck, and drive off. I mean, it's not like we're hiding the thing. In the case of the Scottish bombers [who ignited a vehicle loaded with gasoline canisters at the Glasgow airport] last summer, it was actually a license plate recognition system that identified them for the police to make the final arrest. God knows why these guys, in probably the most surveilled society in the world, didn't try to change the license plates.

If the technology is well designed and implemented, dealers shouldn't be able to work directly underneath the camera. You should have mobile cameras. There is some great video technology out there right now that can look out 360 degrees all at once.



Q  If I'm a resident of a city whose local government is investing in video surveillance, what are some of the questions I should have for my city?

A  Why are you putting it in? Why are you spending my tax dollars? There ought to be reasons other than just, We need a new toy. When you have such a reason, that should also influence the design of the system. It's not simply, We need cameras and a recorder, but Where are those cameras going to be located? Do they have to be day/night cameras? What sort of resolution? How high will they be? Up on lampposts? Do they need evidential-quality video that will stop crimes, or are they trying to manage only access control—see who is at the door at a municipal building before opening it. You need to understand what the objective is.

The next set of questions ought to be about what is going to be done with all the video being collected. After the initial objective has been satisfied, my personal feeling is that those images ought to be destroyed. If you are using the images for access control, then all you need the images for is to decide if that the person is the right person for entering the building. If no crime has been committed and seven days have passed, then that image should be erased.



Q How long should police departments hold on to their video?

A Typically, it's fourteen to thirty days. Sometimes the police don't know about a crime immediately. Or a crime has occurred somewhere else, but the video captured something that would help you understand that crime better. And that just takes the detective process a couple of weeks to satisfy. But, honestly, any video older than a month does not have tremendous value. It also drives up the cost for the municipality to buy the system, because of the storage.



Q Does having a video surveillance system in place require more police support? Are there human beings actually watching the footage?

A Some systems that we put in require live viewing because the customers need to see things happening as they are actually happening. In casinos, you want to actually stop a con at a blackjack table as it is in progress. Another environment is prison. You want to prevent a stabbing or whatever while it is in progress. In public surveillance situations, you're more likely to look at the footage after the fact. It's more likely to be used to solve crimes.

One reason is simple cost. You can have only so many people sitting there watching those cameras. And secondly, people really need to be trained to watch these cameras and stay focused on them and know what to look for. In some communities, the public can be trained, so they can go into these surveillance rooms and help the police watch these feeds.

Technology is helping to solve that problem too. There's something called video analytics, which is basically software that looks for patterned behaviors in the images. If you instruct it to look for X, and something that looks like X happens, the feed will flash in front of the observer. It will allow the individual to focus on suspicious behavior rather than try to find it in seven hundred cameras.

The system we installed in Minneapolis has analytics. It can look for, in one case, people walking onto the platform with luggage but getting onto the train without that luggage.



Q Petards wasn't involved in Baltimore's blue-light video surveillance system, but do you have any opinions on how well it functions?

A I've talked to a few people who've been involved in the project here. I think one of the challenges that Baltimore has with the blue-light cameras is that they run on digital video recorders that are resident within each camera. So you need to actually take a cherry picker to pull those DVRs out and put new ones in, whenever you need the footage [for evidence]. That's a huge amount of manpower, and costly. Wireless has become far less expensive since those were installed, so wireless should certainly be considered as an option.



Q Many people are still squeamish about the Big Brother aspect of video cameras—that they will be spied upon by the government officials, or—even worse—footage of them doing something foolish will end up on YouTube. How would you allay these fears?  

A Video images are part of the times we live in. But we need to do something to ensure that people respect the technology and appreciate it, rather than fear it. I wouldn't just focus on cameras—I'd focus on technology. Technology is becoming more pervasive and networked in our society. And the question is, really, how do we see technology in the future as individuals?

You don't know what is happening with your image now. But if Congress took action and said, "This is how we're going to handle video surveillance in public places going forward," that would actually make everyone far more comfortable with the government undertaking video surveillance.

There is an interesting conundrum that we have in America. Whether the country actually is or not, a lot of us think of this as a laissez faire society. But, when it comes to regulation of information, the country's very unwillingness to legislate reduces our individual rights and strengthens the hands of government and business.



Q What sort of legislation would you have in mind?

A I think we need to begin to think of what the worst-case scenarios are. We really need to think about people who can't make decisions for themselves, and by that I'm referring to the issue of privacy for children.



Q The idea of putting cameras around schools seems like it could be both a good and a bad thing.

A My son goes to public school in Baltimore City and I would have no problem with the school district putting cameras on his school. But I'd also want to know what that school is going to do with those images of him. When you talk about children making decisions [in the electronic realm], they will usually make decisions that will disregard their privacy. We shouldn't put them in the position that would force them to make that decision. It's another reason we need government to act on privacy.



Q What else do you see coming down the road?

A We're going to see more and more information being collected about us without our knowledge as business models are designed to capture information about consumers. We'll get to the point where facial recognition allows me to recognize that you have just entered the Giant food store. We know you've been buying the regular milk, but you show an inclination for organic products, so we should target you for organic milk while you're here. I'm not sure you want that. I'm not sure society is going to be comfortable with technology knowing that much about you.

It really comes down not just to collecting information in one facet of your life but collecting it in many different facets and putting it all together. When you begin to mix those databases together, you learn things about the individual no one wants known. That's where is the real threat is.

—Joab Jackson wrote about the closing of Blob's Park in the December Urbanite.



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