A private security company, Vumacam, will be installing new CCTV cameras in the City of Tshwane to combat street crime.
The company announced on Wednesday that it had received approval from the city and that the preliminary phase of erecting poles for the cameras will begin in August.
Once complete, the surveillance network will be made available to the South African Police Services (SAPS), the Tshwane Metro Police, and private security contractors, allowing officials to fight crime in real-time, according to MyBroadband.
Licence plate recognition
Vumacam’s cameras are equipped with specialized licence plate recognition technology, and are linked to multiple databases that flag “vehicles of interest” – cars that have either been stolen or are wanted for suspected criminal activities.
The feed from these cameras is beamed to integrated intelligence operations centres (IIOCs) through high-speed fibre cables, where staff review the footage in the monitoring room and decide whether to dispatch a ground unit to investigate.
The monitoring systems are also fitted with motion detectors and night vision, and the footage they record is time-stamped and stored on cloud servers in case it is needed in a court proceeding.
While Vumacam may be new to Pretoria, it has been operating in Johannesburg for years, where it reportedly picks up around 4,500 incidents of suspicious vehicles and activity every day thanks to a network of more than 6,000 cameras that covers 70% of the city, according to TimesLive.
“While we have just launched the initiative in Tshwane, the response and uptake has already been impressive, and we have no doubt that we will see the tide turn against crime in Tshwane as it has in Johannesburg,” said Michael Varney, the CEO at Vumacam.
The CEO also said that several private security contractors had signed up with Vumacam as partners in Tshwane, and that negotiations are underway to add more in the coming months.
Privacy and false flags
While Vumacam’s surveillance systems may use licence plate recognition, it does not make use of facial recongition as it is not as foolproof and impacts the privacy of ordinary citizens.
“We believe [facial recognition] is unreliable and therefore is lacking both ethically and in terms of being effective,” said Varney.
“It also decreases the risk of false arrests, inaccurate information, provides safe location oversight for our partners, and gives us and the public peace of mind that our network respects both South Africans’ right to safety and privacy,” he said.
Keyword: New roadside cameras coming to Tshwane to catch stolen and suspicious cars