facial-recognition become a hot-button
issue in the US the controversial
practice was recently banned in San
Francisco but few people realize that
many police departments have adopted
artificial intelligence using it to
analyze video surveillance footage which
can track objects and people I've taken
the eight thousand and 213 objects and
I've reduced it to 80 objects other new
technologies like sensors drones
equipped with augmented reality
capabilities and real time crime centers
are also making their way into police
departments in the US all that
technology used for the right purposes
and away reasons I think is is good so
Wow no I don't want to be mugged I want
to be in a community that's safe I don't
think expanding surveillance is the way
to do that there is just a lot of
technology being acquired
that's collecting information on
everyone regardless of whether you're
involved in a crime or not and I don't
want to end up in a version of America
where people are afraid to do things in
life because of being watched all the
time to understand how police
departments use these new technologies
which makes law-enforcement much more
powerful we traveled to New Orleans for
the past year and a half the city's
Office of Homeland Security's been
operating a real-time crime Center the
city's installed over 400 cameras in hot
spots from the French Quarter to outer
lying districts it also pulls in camera
feeds from over 150 businesses and
private homeowners the system screens
all incoming calls for service including
911 which automatically activates the
network of cameras all of these cameras
would spin up automatically in software
when any incident is created within 1/10
of a mile of these three blocks so your
eyes can be there before an officer's
eyes sure all of our cameras are pan
tilt zoom cameras 30 times optical zoom
and you can very easily rewind back and
also see it happening sure if it's
obviously associated with a criminal
matter would go through historical
footage and provide that information to
the officers some police officers in New
Orleans have quickly embraced this
access to recorded surveillance cameras
mr. it's pretty well covered by cameras
yes cameras on every intersection Paul
Johnson's been with the New Orleans
police force for six years he's a night
shift detective in the French Quarter
that came right there hidin in plain
sight right there correct yes this
particular camera actually has assisted
me on one of my latest cases Park a
couple months ago we had a shooting at
this very intersection at 4:30 in the
morning of the gentleman that got shot
to fame to me the victim we watched the
video surveillance went back and it
showed that actually he was actually
shooting at the young man first so it
kind of you know helped us exonerate the
guy we were looking for and if you
didn't have the camera do you think he
would have known the truth no absolutely
not we talked to Paul Noel the
second-in-command of the New Orleans
Police there are critics out there and
people who aren't comfortable with the
idea of the police having cameras
absolutely you know the more information
that we have out there we need to make
sure we're using that information for
the appropriate purposes that's one
thing we absolutely stress here in the
Wallens is that you know we have
accountability measures in place with
all the information that we have that
information that could be abused by our
investigators one of the critics
questioning the surveillance cameras in
New Orleans is community activist Dede
Greene she says that some people in her
group stopped watching NOAA are afraid
that they're being monitored since a
camera was placed right next to their
community garden knowing that the city
is observing you and monitoring you may
make people uneasy and uncomfortable
about having a public conversation about
the politics of the city in your
neighborhood is there consensus that
these cameras shouldn't be here no I
don't think so at all I attend a lot of
Neighborhood Association meetings people
will say we need a camera on this corner
because this is a crime corner or this
is a problem corner it's very easy to
sell the narrative that these are here
for your protection
we know that people of color black and
brown folks are disproportionately
profiled and targeted by police arrests
did incarcerated so while no I don't
want to be mugged I want to be in a
community that's safe I don't think
expanding surveillance is the way to do
that what most people like DD Green
don't know is that not only can the
video be watched and played back the
system is now equipped with machine
learning and can analyze the content of
recordings itself without any human
oversight the crime center in New
Orleans uses a product called brief cam
in your case you simply said red truck
so if I change the class of this to
pickup and the color to red
I've taken the eight thousand two
hundred thirteen objects that went
through this space in a matter of two
hours and I've reduced it to 80 objects
and I can finish watching the totality
of it in a minute in 45 seconds
superimposing them on top of one another
it's bringing in that actual object onto
a fixed still frame and showing its
total path driver a truck
more and more law enforcement and public
safety agencies across the u.s. are
buying these kinds of technologies
Motorola Solutions is one of the largest
vendors in the space in Plantation
Florida the companies showing us some of
its newest high-tech gadgets and
technologies which the company only
gives to potential law enforcement
customers the demo also includes a drone
mounted camera Motorola Solutions sells
a system that augments drone footage
with real-time information like labels
identifying each officer on the scene
Daniel T Aldi for Motorola Solutions is
playing a suspected criminal and I'm a
police officer at a private testing
ground that's closed to the public so
this is you walking up on the scene and
we're tracking you from the drone feed
TLD attacks and stabs me when the smart
vest is pierced the embedded sensors
automatically notify the command posts
so they can send reinforcements it also
switches on the body worn camera because
your body camera came on we actually
have a description of who stabbed you an
analyst from Motorola shows us how using
the suspects description he can
electronically hunt him down we know
that it was a man we know that he was
wearing a red shirt we know generally
what time it was as we start seeing all
these people in red
shirts we can start looking for the
actual individual that we're looking for
Motorola Solutions calls this
descriptive artificial intelligence the
machine can pull from the pixels a
description of a truck a car or a person
you can see our results get better and
better as we get more of them we see
more and more they also tries to isolate
and pull out a clean shot of the face
the face tile as its called
the face tile can be used to refine the
search by looking for that same face on
other cameras connected to the system if
you have a long enough period of time
you can begin to see patterns of
behavior as well most definitely most
definitely once it knows what to look
for the system can also search backwards
in time to track a particular
individuals prior locations this virtual
time machine experts say is a game
changer it could in many cases eliminate
the need for officers to track a suspect
in person for days on end some of these
new video analytics tools can detect
weapons or unusual behavior direction
violated yeah this is your typical one
so if you're at the airport you're
coming out of those TSA areas if
anybody's walk in the direction of the
arrows they're fine if they turn around
and walk in the other direction it's
going to flag viola the newest usage of
artificial intelligence is a camera that
will train itself to find unusual
movements the camera will learn the
normal motion activities in a scene over
about a week or two weeks and after that
learning period it will just
automatically create an event and flag
you when something happens it's unusual
for that scene the system is flagged
people walking their dogs as unusual
motion detection at night there is ZERO
human input in this situation you
basically turn it on the camera learns
and does everything automatically it
sounds to me like this is in more places
than most people realize well it is an
active and live product today it is
installed in many places across the u.s.
definitely we asked Andrew Sinclair
general manager of Motorola Solutions
about the privacy implications of the
technology if something doesn't seem
right say something to the police our
camera is able to do the same kind of
thing there's things like anomaly
detections but what about someone acting
suspiciously well people's behavior is
difficult because machine learning is
not a
about level yet but a crowd suddenly
appears at an intersection where we
wouldn't normally see a crowd appearing
at an intersection I mean the critics
out there saying this is becoming
surveillance on steroids we're creating
a surveillance stage what do you say to
them I think it's important that we have
the critics out there saying well
because we have to make sure that the
right checks and balances are put in
this space but you have to make sure
that that same technology can't be used
to track your ex-girlfriend one of these
critics is Dave Moss he's an
investigative researcher at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation a
non-for-profit that defends civil
liberties in the digital age mas is
skeptical that the police can police
itself one of the things that worries me
about the future of policing is how
automated it's becoming mas and other
experts are concerned that these
unsupervised systems make calls on who
belongs and who does not potentially
amplifying racial bias for example a
camera might alert police officers to a
perceived motion irregularity it
detected like an african-american man
walking through a predominantly white
neighborhood with very little foot
traffic they also pointed the fact that
every police encounter is potentially
dangerous and these kinds of alerts
could lead to unreasonable stops and
searches by the police
artificial intelligence is becoming a
sort of black box with law enforcement
where we don't necessarily know where
they're using it and how they're using
it the next generation of body-worn
cameras will have AI based search
capabilities already built-in I'm
looking for a person in a red shirt yes
this way all body worn cameras in one
city could be searching for a man in a
red shirt or a missing child in real
time and that's what's concerning is
this mass surveillance on society and
what kind of impact that will have on
society in terms of self-censorship the
ability to organize and I don't want to
end up in a version of America where
people are afraid to do things in life
because of being watched all the time