Here We Go Again

The ShotSpotter technology isn't even gone from utility poles and the lib-tards over at the Tribune have tapped one of their tame monkeys to attack the next target (paywalled article - find a proxy server to get around it):

• The police radio crackled with a report of six gunshots near a busy corner in Humboldt Park. In a city that has struggled more than most to solve serious crimes, this summer 2023 shooting offered detectives an immediate advantage. At that corner, police had long ago mounted one of thousands of sophisticated surveillance cameras, the kind that could rotate around a 360-degree view, or zoom in to see activity up to four blocks away.

  Sure enough, records show, an officer tapped into a live feed from the camera in time to see that a wounded victim had managed to get inside a restaurant. But the camera hadn’t captured images of the shooter. No video from the camera was put into evidence, and the case, like so many others, remains unsolved.

  What happened that night in July 2023 underscores the potential and, at times, futility of the city’s massive, 20-year bet on a network of cameras typically affixed to utility poles across the city. In the shadow of the 2001 terrorist attacks and in a city with persistent crime problems, then-Mayor Richard M. Daley pushed the so-called Police Observation Devices as a game changer, one that would “stop violent crime before it occurs.”

  Two decades, hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of cameras later, an Illinois Answers Project and Chicago Tribune investigation has found that reality has fallen far short of those early promises. While installing thousands of police surveillance cameras has undoubtedly helped catch criminals and solve crimes, Chicago’s ever-growing system has yet to become the crime-fighting panacea Daley predicted.

We've railed against a lot of this for years....tens of years. All the cameras ever do is increase the chances that your victimization is preserved on video in the unlikely event of an apprehension and prosecution. More likely, it ends up being FOIAed and put on one of those ghoul websites or passed around on social media.

The two purposes of cameras (and ShotSpotter for that matter) is/was:

• to make money via a connected contract for someone who would then make a sizable donation to the appropriate political candidate, and
• to make money via electronic storage for someone who would then make a sizable donation to the appropriate political candidate.
  

Forget gigabytes. Does anyone have any idea what storage companies charge for terabytes? Petabytes? Chicago has thousands of POD cameras, all sorts of red-light and speed cameras, not to mention squad car cams, body cams, and drone/helicopter footage, all generating TONS of data on an hourly basis. And all of it gets stored for a looooooong time.

Petabytes might be a thing of the past already.