Crowdsourced Neighborhood and City Security — A Simple Idea that Could Work

All we need are our phones and windows

Crime outside our office windows

This is the building I work at in Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It’s a 9-story building that occupies an entire city block.

Crime is rampant in the area. Here are a few very recent examples:

• March 14: Window on campus building shattered by stray bullet from a double shooting (one fatal; suspect at large).
• March 12: Attempted armed robbery at Subway restaurant 1.5 blocks away (suspect fled).
• March 8: Successful armed robbery at 7–Eleven 1 block away (suspect fled).
• March 5: Successful robbery of Wells Fargo bank across the street (suspect fled).

So while me and hundreds of other pencil-pushers are inside working at our desks, major criminal activity is going on outside our windows. We might see it if we were paying attention at the right moments.

Crime outside our bedroom windows

Here’s a shot of a relatively safe neighborhood near Baltimore’s Patterson Park. Sadly, about 20% of the front doors have notes on them to not leave packages on the doorstep. Not a huge deal — let’s be honest, we all nab a package from time to time.

More objectively, a crime map of the region shows 16 incidents over the past month. Lots of smash-and-grabs, mostly late at night.

It seems to me that people are routinely smashing car windows (or prying the doors open) to steal stuff in places like this, right outside dozens of street-facing windows.

Are you smelling what I’m stepping in?

The idea is simple: Rather than have our phones in our pockets while we work or on our nightstands while we sleep, we prop them up against our windows and livestream. Then, someone (me) scrapes the videos from the web and organizes them on an interactive map.

I think there are many advantages to this approach. Relative to CCTV:

• Don’t have to lobby for city funds to install and maintain cameras.
• Much better coverage, potentially.
• Citizens contribute to and interact with the video.

And relative to the current model of homeowner-specific security cameras:

• Don’t have to buy and install a camera.
• Don’t have to pay a monthly subscription.
• Can see real-time and archived footage across entire network.
• Easy to see what areas are covered.

It’s live — you can contribute right now

I developed a web app, which is available at https://vandomed.shinyapps.io/nocrimezone/. Here’s what it looks like:

This is after zooming to “Baltimore” and clicking on one of the videos I uploaded a few days ago (so not live as of today).

There are only about a dozen videos up so far, all by me, and all in the Baltimore region. The app shows all videos uploaded to date, but if the user base increases I’ll change it to only show videos from the past day or maybe even past few hours.

Users can also select a particular day/time to search for videos, which will be very convenient for finding relevant footage around the time of an incident.

How to contribute

All you have to do is start a YouTube livestream; click Share, select Twitter, add #nocrimezone, and check Share precise location; and position your phone with a street view.

You can verify it worked by finding your video on the app. As long as you’re live, the video will actually play in real time on the map.

It’s also fine to record a video in full (as a livestream or regular video) and post the tweet afterwards. The app will still find it and add the video to the map.

Sounds creepy and possibly illegal

Story of my life.

I realize there are privacy and stalking concerns, but I think there are ways to address them (e.g. account-based system to view videos, lower frame rate or blur videos and remove links to YouTube, etc).

A whole new world

A crowdsourced network of security cameras could have far-reaching consequences. It could reduce street crime, perhaps making it possible for people (especially women) to be able to leave their houses at night without worry. It could reduce package thefts and smash-and-grabs. It could increase police accountability, and might even counteract the opioid epidemic (more difficult to deal drugs on street corners and out of homes).

All we need are street-facing windows and smartphones, and we’ve got plenty of both. If we get enough people on board, I think we can make our neighborhoods much safer very quickly, at no cost and without any political maneuvering.