More Dutch cities using smart cameras to identify crimes despite reliability concerns

More and more Dutch cities are experimenting with smart cameras despite concerns about their reliability. Detecting violence is a particularly common use for the devices in Dutch municipalities, but the cameras commonly pick up innocent movements like children playing, RTL Nieuws reports.

Trials are happening or being prepared in Almere, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Sittard-Geleen, among others. The cameras come with software that analyzes movements and can send an alert when it detects something. The software is supplied by the Utrecht company Oddity.ai.

The police in The Hague have been using the software for several years and are enthusiastic about it. However, officers told RTL that the smart software is sometimes not that smart. Cameras often alert officers to innocent movements, such as a child doing a cartwheel, a flag waving, or two seagulls fighting over food.

Figures from Sittard-Geleen show a similar picture, according to the broadcaster. The Limburg municipality has been experimenting with Oddity for a year. In a period of over four months, the 10 smart cameras picked up 34 violent incidents. They also sent alerts for 96 events that kind of looked like violence - children playing, people frolicking, and boxing movements in the air - and 260 alerts for things that didn’t resemble violence at all.

“A lot of experimentation and testing is taking place at the municipal level,” Bart Karstes of the Rathenau Institute told RTL. He previously examined Eindhoven’s experiment with Oddity in 2019. “It often proves difficult to move from these types of pilot projects to actual use.”

“The idea is that officers or enforces on the street can respond more quickly,” Karstens explained. “That is not that easy. Observers have to monitor all kinds of situations that resemble violence to pick out a few that actually involve a conflict. How much faster is that, really? In Eindhoven, it was never completely clear to me what gains were made. That is a question I still have.”