The View From Aileen Street

Between a SWAT team, several helicopters, K-9 Units, and a fleet of officers brought in from surrounding areas, the city likely spent as much as six-figures yesterday evening trying to find suspects fleeing from a homicide, and a resulting high speed chase and hit-and-run that happened on Aileen St and MLK in Oakland, a couple blocks from my house. My neighbors and I were asked to stay indoors and endure the sound of helicopters and bullhorns late into the night. And some of us witnessed and were the victim of a sudden strike of violence to our normally quiet pocket of North Oakland.

The worst part of the ordeal is that the manhunt has produced nothing. The police have not found their guys. And there was no way I could safely try to help in the effort. The ordeal has gotten me revisiting a presentation from #SWSF09 by the founder of a site called OurBlock that crowdsources video streams from webcams placed in the windows of San Francisco residents.

The site has already helped stop crimes and catch criminals, and it certainly would have helped to have around here yesterday. But in a flat mixed zoning neighborhood like mine, it might be better to expand on the idea, using resources at our disposal.

Specifically, I’m thinking about cameras on traffic lights. Regardless of whether the camera is used to snap photographs of misbehaving drivers, the camera and its placement works well just because it doesn’t get in anyone’s way. It would be possible to get a lot of inexpensive cameras into public just by putting them on our traffic lights, street signs, and other fixtures, and form a project to implement an open source protocol for the cameras. It’s given a simple, straightforward name like PubCam.

No, public webcams are not inherently Orwellian. I know some people will never be convinced, but public surveillance can use transparency and open source logic to open itself to debate and constant iterative improvement.

Consider the scenario of a hook from the 911 systems that activates the nearest public webcams within 200 meters of the call. 911 operatives can then modify the behavior of webcams, expanding the radius of surveillance or turning off surveillance.

There are public logs of webcam behavior including all relevant information, available through a standard REST service. For instance, a JSON response from their server might look something like this:

{
  "status": "OFF",
  "webcam_id": "9202a8c04",
  "history": [{
      "action": "OFF",
       "time":" 2009-05-17 22:48:01,289",
      "user":"790157" 
       },
{
      "action": "ON",
       "time":"2009-05-17 22:37:12,459",     
      "user":"790157"
 }]

}

The webcams themselves would have clearly indicate their on/off status. Maybe something as simple as a lens door being open or shut.

By no means do I consider this proposal complete - it’s still solidly in the half-baked phase. And yes, this project would be controversial.

But the police put a lot of wasted effort yesterday and they didn’t find their guys, and Oakland and part of Berkeley had to go to sleep through the night with helicopters above their roofs. Shouldn’t that be controversial?