Wichita, Kansas has revitalized downtown (ran off the junkies, wino and homeless who used to hang out there) for a wealthier better class of people. With the addition of all the foliage in and around the fern bars, wine tasting venues city planners discovered they had plenty of natural cover for a network of closed-circuit TV’s. The closed circuit system was necessary to provide the infrastructure for the Free WI-FI. The PD now has 250 hours of video of the same wino taking a shit in the same vacant lot at about the same time for the past year. (I made that up, but I bet they do.)

These systems work, unfortunately, they are most effective after the fact. Keep in mind the Boston Marathon Bombing and the incidents in London. London probably leads the world in CCTV surveillance. After the fact it is just a matter of putting enough eyes on enough tape to piece things together. I would be willing to bet that the FBI can account for almost every minute the brothers were in CCTV range.

The hard part is deciding in real time what constitutes criminal activity in real time. Police officers do it every day, but they are not the ones watching the video in the command center. They ought to be making drug cases, purse snatching, mugging cases, car burglary and car theft cases like they were going out of style. I would expect assault cases to drop significantly. This system apparently can transmit a video directly to a responding patrol car, which should aid in the identification of suspects. In order to do that, you have to have somebody who can first recognize a dope deal.

Wichita, instead is going to use this resource to bird dog stop signs and traffic lights to go after traffic violators. Missed Opportunity local/crime/article

Remember what the day after Christmas was like when the kids were young? There they were surrounded by toys and playing with the fuckin boxes! Somethings never change.