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| 63 2 Police Power and the Smart CCTV Experiment Real-Time Facial Surveillance and Identification System Revolutionizes the functionality of conventional CCTV Active, real-time identification for today’s passive CCTV systems— Not affected by superficial changes in appearances Remembers large numbers of faces Does not get distracted or fatigued. —Visionics Corporation, brochure for FaceIt ARGUS, 2002 In her classic essay “Tales from the Cutting Room Floor” published in Harper’s, Debra Seagal recounts five and a half months in 1992 that she spent working as a “story analyst” for the television show American Detective . Referred to in-house as a “logger,” Seagal’s job involved sitting in front of a “computer/VCR/print monitor/TV screen/headphone console,” scrutinizing hours of raw video footage taken for the show, and creating a running log of all the visual and auditory elements that could be used to “create ” a story.1 Laboring at this monotonous job of video image processing, Seagal quickly descends into the abysmal world of the reality-based cop show, forced to watch the destitute and marginalized people who appear in the images before her—mostly prostitutes and people committing petty drug crimes—as they experience all manner of humiliations and injustices. She loses interest in the detectives whose sordid work she is obliged to witness , and begins to empathize with the “little people,” “whose stories never make it past the highlight reel.”2 Although she did not identify much with the police, Seagal’s job at American Detective bore some important resemblances to the work of certain police workers themselves, especially those unfortunate enough to have the post of monitoring video surveillance systems. In the 1990s, a growing number of people had to perform such labor, as the use of video surveillance systems by police and private security agencies became more widespread. This “visualization” of police work has had wide-ranging 64 | Police Power and the Smart CCTV Experiment implications, beyond simply helping the fight against crime. Like Seagal’s account of her brief career as a video analyst, the spread of police video surveillance has raised important questions about the labor of processing this explosion of visual information, about the amount and form of police power that video technology has enabled, and about struggles over the legitimacy of that power—all issues of central concern to this chapter. While interest in the use of television technology for police surveillance is almost as old as television itself, it was more recently that the volume of such use began to pose major challenges for the police. As a result of their expanded use of closed-circuit television in the 1980s and 1990s, police and private security agencies began to face the problem of how to handle the explosion of visual information being generated by these systems. A single CCTV system, with twenty cameras running twenty-four hours a day, produced the equivalent of 480 hours of video footage, exponentially increasing the amount of work required to monitor these systems.3 Surveillance and identification practices posed a problem of labor: not only was monitoring surveillance video mind-numbingly dull work, but the labor costs of managing thousands of hours of video was placing a heavy burden on both public law enforcement agencies and the growing private security sector. Recognizing a business opportunity, entrepreneurs attempting to commercialize facial recognition technology introduced the idea of “Smart CCTV”—the integration of automated facial recognition with video surveillance—as a potential solution to these problems of surveillance labor and video overload. Automated facial recognition, along with other computer vision technologies like license plate recognition and “anomaly detection,” promised to provide a means of creating “algorithmic” forms of surveillance that could automatically manage the enormous amount of video imagery generated by CCTV systems without adding hundreds of human observers.4 But was facial recognition technology ready for such an application? What would have to happen to make Smart CCTV a reality, a functioning technology for monitoring city streets and other spaces? How would the technology be integrated into police practice, and what would that practice look like as a result? In June 2001, Ybor City—a historic-entertainment district in Tampa, Florida, known as Tampa’s “Latin Quarter”—became the first urban area in the United States to have its public streets fitted with a Smart CCTV system. Visionics Corporation began a project with the Tampa Police Department (TPD) to incorporate the company’s automated facial recognition product, called FaceIt, into an existing thirty...

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