Surveillance Cameras in Highland Square

Posted yesterday on Ohio dot com:

Akron police-operated security cameras soon will be monitoring activity in the Highland Square business area and on Copley Road, west of Diagonal Road.

Both locales are in West Akron.

The cameras, which will continuously pan the areas once they become operational in October, represent the first segment of a security project, George Romanoski, Akron's deputy mayor for public safety, said in a news release issued today.

* * *


The recorded video will be stored in the cameras for up to two weeks.

Police looked at severity and frequency of incidents in choosing areas for the cameras. Also, residents, business owners and judges have recommended spots.

All the information in the story comes from the press release. It would have been interesting to learn whether the choice of Highland square was based on the crime number crunching or the neighborhood "recommendations." HS residents have been concerned about some high-profile muggings and assaults lately and can be quite relentless about "recommending" things. On the other hand, it's an open question whether HS is a high crime an area in need of high-tech policing.

Of course it could go the other way with Square denizens resenting the surveillance. Big Brother and all that. You never can tell with the Square. As of tonight, they haven't started talking about it on the HSNA website.

By the way, the big advance in technology which has made this sort of thing possible isn't the cameras themselves, but the data storage. Think for a moment about a hardwired camera leading to a video tape deck. You would be generating three tapes a day which, after two weeks, adds up to 54 tapes. Just finding the physical space to store the media was a real problem. Now the camera itself will store the equivalent of all those tapes.