Monday, June 20, 2011

Social Media and CCTV

CCTV "services" are being more popular as a crime deterrent in Cape Town. Crimewatch, a local private crime patrol and alarm monitoring service, recently introduced a CCTV crime monitoring service in our neighborhood, Milnerton Ridge. Payment for the service is on a voluntary contribution basis for now. Crimewatch hopes that our neighborhood sees value in such a service and will then actively contribute to sustaining the service as well as extending it further into the neighborhood.

If this has not been done yet then I'm hoping that Crimewatch picks up on the idea of using Twitter to add an extra layer of citizen/voluntary monitoring/feedback to the general Crimewatch suburb crime monitoring service. I'm suggesting that concerned citizens tweet about suspicious activity in their immediate area. Such tweeting is already common practice. Crimewatch could then verify any accidents, transgressions or potential transgressions by checking their CCTV system at the time-stamp of the tweet. Our local policing service (1011) could monitor the same public network.

The reality is that it costs a lot of money to offer a 24-hour monitoring service. This means that it is not financially feasible for the likes of Crimewatch as well as our Police service to have a car on every corner, patrolling every street. I'm sure that even the 24-hour CCTV monitoring team occasionally takes their eye off the ball (toilet, microwave, naps :)).

Think Smart City where monitoring and reporting is built into its fabric, where citizens do not tolerate other citizens blatantly breaking the law. The building blocks already exist, just not in a integrated fashion.
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