Some time back I had a break-in at my house. A few gigabytes of CCTV I provided to the police and the person went away for a year or so for mine and a number of other similar offences.
Today I received an invitation to register my security system with the constabulary … not surprisingly after a quick non-exhaustive search, I found a number of other jurisdictions also on the agenda for ‘community input’ …
So a number of questions could potentially be posed, not the least of which in these times where the camera can lie and deep fakes seem well within the realm of the person on the street - how much of this is ok, how much can be trusted and/or how can the veracity of this evidence be established, especially in jurisdictions where access to rigorous forensic validation is questionable? … to list just a couple.
Back in the days of only black and white still images for them to be valuable evidence somebody still had to vouch for their veracity. The same applies to video, if it is taken without human intervention how, when, where etc is still significant if tendered in evidence. Who had access to the video and if they had motive and means to fake it would also be considered.
This could happen irrespective of whether a CCTV system was registered.
Registering a CCTV system removes the need to visually survey houses to fìnd cameras and to knock on the door to ask if cameras are functioning, facing the area of interest and have any footage. The registration allows police to contact owners of known/registered systems to see if there is an footage which maybe of interest. They still have to approach the CCTV owner to obtain copy of any footage/data and use of the data in their investigations.
All registration does is streamline the data gathering process.
Another question in these days of sophisticated hackers and occasional misbehaving police force member; how safe and secure are these lists? Could the information provided become a ‘places to be avoided’ list for miscreants, or perhaps on-sold to hackers to log into (often unsecured, or poorly secured) cameras?
