An illusory sense of security

Opinion surveys show that wherever cameras have been installed people think they are safer and it is probably not just auto-suggestion. Even more satisfied are those who have had these systems installed. A few years ago, at an annual conference entitled “Safe City,” a delegation from a small town proudly presented an effect of the local surveillance system: the capture of a man who has broken into a kiosk with cigarettes. But with time it has turned out that this generation of security and surveillance systems installed in Poland is not a remedy for everything and that its further expansion often gets us into a dead-end situation.

Let us quote just two examples. The first one – the question of security in stadiums and at mass events - is important in the context of the UEFA Euro 2012 football tournament to be hosted by Poland, an event which is supposed to contribute to the rapid development of the country’s infrastructure. Although stadiums now have to be equipped with video surveillance and although law has been changed to deal with football-related offences, in most cases the level of security has not been significantly enhanced. We can still see fights at such events, assaults on other spectators and security guards, and offenders breaching orders banning them from coming to stadiums. And even if such cases are brought to court police often “lacks sufficient evidence.”

The second example is road safety cameras. The primitive equipment used by road police means that the whole problem of road traffic safety and good manners on the road has been reduced to one thing: speeding. Unfortunately, road police is not able to manage this “technology.” Being primitive, it requires too much human time to monitor camera footage.

It has to be admitted that the use of first-generation devices involves constraints. Security guards and policemen are only able to monitor three or five video displays for no longer than several minutes. Systems composed of dozens of cameras are beyond perception. So far, crowd surveillance and identification in a crowd have been known in Poland mainly from thrillers.



Support at hand

In the past several years, especially after September 11, 2001, a real breakthrough has been made in electronic property security systems in three important areas.

Firstly, there has been much progress in the area of equipment, with better image recording, automated image analysis, and object, human and behaviour recognition. “It is now possible to identify individuals in a crowd of 5,000 people,” says Tadeusz Bieniak, president of ISM EuroCenter SA. “The systems can raise the alarm if they detect a person moving in a direction in which they should not be moving or a person who has put a package somewhere and left. And we know soon whether or not the person’s face has been recorded while making a previous attempt to enter the security zone or whether it is in some files. The operator watching a wall of monitors can see nothing on it: the amount of information is too large. But the intelligent system can correlate everything and suggest decisions to him.”

The second breakthrough is the potential to integrate many systems, or elements of many systems, into a solution tailored to the property’s specific needs. A very important feature is that it is possible to use elements already installed and functioning. Existing solutions do not need to be squeezed out by new and better ones. Instead, they can be improved, thus reducing the cost of the new installation.

The third area is cost. In the past, although quite many elements of the new advanced technologies were available on the market, their prices were unaffordable for most of the potential buyers. In recent years, production costs went down significantly, leading to a reduction in prices of these products. After all, the products are supposed to prevent undesired actions and scare away intruders rather than buyers.