May they fail

Times Square echoes Bladerunner - hyper-commercialized,
electronic billboards in every direction

by Gregory Saville

The writing on the shop walls and the floating billboards was Anglo-Chinese. On the street, the cityspeak combined English, Chinese and Spanish, a vernacular that served the homeless, the marginally employed and the unfortunate. Pollution and environmental collapse led to constant clouds and pelting rain. The affluent traveled to off-world colonies on Mars and elsewhere, leaving the rest of us behind. Bio-engineered, human-like robots called Replicants used their artificial intelligence and rebelled.

That was the horrific world described in Philip K. Dick’s book that became the 1982 sci-fi classic, Bladerunner. I blogged on Bladerunner architecture last year. When I watched Bladerunner in the 1980s it seemed like an impossible future. And it was set for such a long way ahead – 2019!

That's next year! With only a month left, how close is that future?

No escape - walls of electonics

UNFOLDING AS WE SPEAK

It doesn’t take much imagination to see a Bladerunner vision unfolding. True, we are nowhere near that specific dystopia. We still don’t have flying cars (but we have self-driving ones!). Yet, one wonders...

This week I watched NASA’s exciting landing on the planet Mars. Space X CEO Elon Musk says he’ll get people to Mars within six years. How long before off-world colonies evolve?

This year I watched the fruits of some incredible advances in artificial intelligence and bio-engineering, including the world tour of the remarkable Sophie, the first thinking and speaking robot to attain citizenship. Sophie tells us not to worry; real robots are not like Bladerunner.

Then there is the decades-long Chinese economic miracle or the environmental mess we watch with increasing regularity in hurricanes, wildfires, species extinction and climate chaos.

Philip K. Dick, it seems, was on track.

How might we derail that particular future? The usual formula is to rethink geo-politics and create new macroeconomics. Nevertheless, the maxim ‘think global, act local’ has special relevance here. Take, for example, Philadelphia!

ONE NEIGHBORHOOD’S STORY 

Over the past few years, we brought SafeGrowth to Philadelphia. We now have some great advocates working for the neighborhood association, HACE. This year they began implementing their latest 10-year 2025 Neighborhood Plan.

For years HACE and friends have been diligently working to transform the blight, drugs, and crime into a greener, socially connected, economically vibrant neighborhood. Now their new, SafeGrowth-infused 2025 plan is underway and they’ve been making strides.

They installed new, clean walking trails where garbage was once strewn.

The HACE Trail project in Philadelphia

They instituted Philadelphia’s first SafeGrowth Livability Academy, a collaborative workshop with 30 neighbors and police during which they developed problem-solving strategies for their neighborhood.

The HACE plan envisions greener areas, community gardens, better resourced neighborhood hubs, safe intergenerational and affordable housing. HACE has already built over 200 units of affordable housing and leveraged over $100 million in redevelopment and improvements. A host of community-building strategies are already underway.

Neighborhood bridge now cleaned and repainted

For example, they, and their partners shut down a drug infested, homeless camp along a railway underpass. That naturally displaced addicts to street level, resulting in a public outcry (after decades of inaction). Ultimately, that led to a more coordinated city response to treat drug users, expand homeless beds and increase shelters.

HACE built affordable housing

There is a long way to go and resources and shelter beds are still scarce (one estimate suggest Philadelphia has 50,000 opioid addicts, many of whom end up here). But at least action is finally underway.

That is the hard community-building work that cuts crime, improves livability, and gets neighbors engaged in shaping their own future.

In spite of successful resident-based projects, cities like Detroit
fund expensive CCTV technology to cut crime

BEYOND SECURITY

Too many mayors get caught up in a fear-based echo chamber that makes them vulnerable to peddlers of security technology and promises of a bright, high-tech future.

Too many city leaders act as obsequious errand-boys for the technologists, embracing the faint promise of hostile architecture, public CCTV, automated security robots, predictive algorithms seeking crime, and audio software to track gang gunfire. (Wouldn't it be better to prevent the gunfire in the first place?)

They do this with the ill-informed hope that technology will prevail. But in doing this, they snatch defeat from the hands of successful action-based community projects right in front of them.

They invite a Bladerunner future. May they fail.

CCTV marries A.I.

Who will keep watch in isolated places?

I have been pondering security technology encroachments into public life, particularly regarding CCTV monitoring. There was a time, it seems now very long ago, that the UK began installing CCTV. Hundreds of millions of dollars, and over four million (and counting) CCTV cameras later, the UK is the most surveilled society on earth.

We were assured that would never happen in the US, or other developed countries. Violate our civil rights? No way cried the libertarian and democratic pundits in unison. 

Still, if you have nothing to hide…

Today, London and Beijing have over 400,000 CCTV each (proving politics is no guarantee either way). In the US there are over 30 million CCTV cameras, mostly in private hands. But there are now CCTV on streets in every major US city (Houston and Chicago lead the way with over 14,000 in Chicago alone) and public support is growing.

Will the brain behind the camera soon be an intelligent computer?

APPLAUDING OR BOOING?

On one hand, we applaud when police apprehend the Boston terrorists due in large measure to public CCTV. We also later watched those same terrorists as they planted and exploded the devices - prevention was not a result of those cameras. 

I always applaud traffic intersection CCTV to cut car crashes, especially in my city where drivers spend more time in narcissistic self-obsession trying to beat the red light rather than watching where they are going. 

CCTV in public spaces is not new

THE NEW REALITY

Recently I’ve been reviewing the latest in CCTV analytics, intelligent tracking and real-time scene analysis. In other words, CCTV on steroids. The latest is no longer motion detection or auto tracking (so old school). The latest is intelligent video analytics, a major evolution from facial recognition software of yesteryear. Video analytics is made possible by exponential increases in processing power and so-called ‘intelligent’ algorithms. 

And now it is part of security and public safety, watching for suspicious movements, packages, behaviors. Watching you! How does the computer know what to look for? It uses algorithms based on past behavior. In future, it may use artificial intelligence to learn on its own. And that is where things get interesting.

Wired magazine puts it this way:

“voice, image, and motion recognition will transform human-computer interfaces into a seamless interaction between the user and all the computing devices in that person’s life.”

A few years ago I blogged about economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin, his forecasts, the Internet of Things and his predictions for disruptive technologies. It seems he was right. Should we be worried?

- Gregory Saville

On the threshold of a robotics revolution

R2D2 patrolling the street in modern day California?

Whenever I read the classic sci-fi Oath of Fealty I think of that mirror world where privileged  insiders reside behind their technology fortress and the rest of us are the mob at the gates. Except we forget that in Niven and Pournelle’s novel their technology fortress was modeled on an arcology, a real-life creation of walkable, ecological, and community-based cities where people collaborate to survive.

Such is the paradox of security; exclusion vs inclusion is hardwired into the beast.

K5 - a mobile emergency "blue light" station - all photos by ©Knightscope, Inc. 2015

Ultimately intention is the key. It fits no one except cynics to claim human nature makes every invention retrograde. Aerial flight may allow militaries to bomb, but planes also allow millions to travel world-wide and experience cultures in every global nook. That arguably brings us closer together.

ENTER THE K5

K5 is an autonomous data machine - aka, a security robot. Advertised by Knightscope as an autonomous neighborhood crime watch, the K5 appeals to both corporate and community. Tackling the high turnover in the security profession (by some accounts up to 400%), the K5 provide more reliable eyes-on-the street for everything from asset protection to identifying threats like armed intruders in schools. It then contacts police with real-time, reliable data and does so 24/7 without sleeping on duty.

K5 patrolling the Microsoft facility in California - ©Knightscope, Inc. 2015

The online promo describes automatic license plate recognition (for stolen cars), CO2 and temperature sensors (for fire), facial recognition with cameras, and low-light video sensors for night-time property monitoring. The gizmos on this robot are impressive; LIDAR, GPS, inertial and odometer sensors, geo-fencing for autonomous control, directional microphones, proximity sensors, and the list goes on.

I don’t really know what to make of K5: Big Brother’s Techno-Bride or R2D2’s charming bleeps? I suppose, ultimately, intention is the thing. True, removing humans from eyes-on-the street is scary. No doubt the robo-phobics will sound alarms.

On the other hand, who said people had to be removed just because they have their own K5 in their neighborhood?

Night-time patrol with low-light sensors - ©Knightscope, Inc. 2015

Knightscope warns us about epidemic crime. While rates are increasing in some places, crime science and police statistics say the opposite, all of which is beside the point. Even in a time of record-breaking crime declines security needs remain high. What bank doesn’t have security cameras?

Whatever the case, for some reason when I look at K5 I am not reminded of Schwarzenegger’s cyborg in Terminator. I’m reminded of Huey, Dewey and Louie, those cute robot drones from the 70s enviro-sci-fi flick, Silent Running. And they end up saving us from ourselves.

Reassurance policing and useless studies

Sir Leon Radzinowicz was a giant in criminology. Escaping from the Nazi’s in WW2, he founded the first-ever department of criminal science at Cambridge in 1941 and then the world famous Cambridge Institute of Criminology in 1959. He wrote some of the most influential works in criminology, spoke multiple languages and was knighted for his excellence in British criminology.

In 1999, a year before he died, I watched one of his last lectures. He was formal, insightful and he spoke with such élan! He was remarkable! His topic: the increasing repressiveness in the justice systems around the world.

That was before 911 security laws, exploding US prison populations and the ascendency of the combat cop over the community cop. Radzinowicz was a latter-day soothsayer. He nailed it!

USELESS STUDIES

I thought of Sir Leon this week regarding another trend he feared: the increasing paranoia by new scholars to publish simply to keep their jobs. In his last interview (below) Radzinowicz spoke of the then new publishing climate where studies provide little value and where statistics are overused and say nothing.

Then I read a recent study about reassurance policing, an academic fad with UK academics regarding so-called signal crime, or how disorderly behavior disproportionately increases crime fears. Kind of a BBW…Brit-Broken-Windows.

Their study examined how well mall shoppers identify cops and security guard uniforms from photos of cops and security guards. Their goal: find out whether different uniformed patrol officers patrolling in shopping malls created “different effects on feelings of safety about crime.”

The results? Uniform police officers might foster anxiety among some members of the public because they suggest crime is a problem, basically what Wendy Sarkissian reported in her guest blog last year. But they also found uniformed police officers reassure other members of the public because they signal formal "guardianship" (I’m not making this up! Honest!)

Sir Leon, please forgive us! I can just feel him cringing.

ANOTHER WAY?

How about we actually make the community safer and involve the community doing so? Maybe they can co-design their spaces with designers, co-manage the space with property managers, and take some defensible space ownership of their shopping venue!

That way they would be safe and they would feel safe since they would have a hand in making it that way. It would be “reassurance policing” without so much formal “guardianship”, fancy uniforms and more useless studies! And then we can let Sir Leon rest in peace.

The visual language of security

Matthais Megyeri's security fence with attitude - photo Matthais Megyeri

Thinking about my Design Out Crime colleagues, I came across Matthais Megyeri a brilliant German artist and designer based in London and Stuttgart. He has exhibited his work around the world including New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Among other fascinating projects with Matthias' company Sweet Dream Security, he redesigns security fences and cameras and shows how to change the visual language of public security devices. This is a much needed gift as security creeps into our lives.

Love chain - photo Matthais Megyeri

I first heard of Matthais last year from Lorraine Gamman at the Design Against Crime Centre in London. She mentioned his work and so I contacted him last year and was impressed by his off-beat and comical art with security devices.

Describing his own work on one blog he says:

"I was never really interested in security products as objects. And I certainly don’t design them because I like them. But I was struck by their visual presence in everyday London life…I decided to use my skills to change the visual language of security products from depressing to seriously humorous."

Check him out.

Birds of a feather - photo Matthais Megyeri

Lock of humour - photo Matthais Megyeri