Body cameras improve safety in CBD.
Street parking marshals in the central business district of Cape Town are wearing cameras on their jackets to stop angry motorists and troublemakers from attacking or yelling abuse at them.
The cameras they wear are part of what is called a ‘body worn video solution’.
Body worn video is quite literally video that someone wears on their body, as opposed to a camera that might be attached to a wall, hang in a shop or sit in the front of a police car. It originated in the UK, but it is now used in America, New Zealand and France.
Street Parking Solutions (SPS), run by Zunade Loghdey, is the company that has brought these body cameras to Cape Town. SPS manages parking spaces on concession from the City of Cape Town. Loghde hopes to keep his marshals safe by using the cameras to calm down angry and errant motorists. Information about how long a motorist has paid to park already gets recorded on handheld devices that send the information back to a central system, but the body cameras will provide an accurate account of fees being paid.
The marshal presses a button on the camera and it records everything they see and hear. They have screens on the front that show what they are recording. Loghde says a “screen shown to motorists or perpetrators is a great deterrent.” The cameras are also in a case with no wires showing, so the marshals just clip them onto their jackets. This keeps them safe, because there is no danger that they might be harmed by loose wires.
People can often get angry at parking marshals, for example if a motorist gets back late to their car and has to pay extra fees. Sometimes they get so angry they might hit someone. Most drivers would probably say they get angry at parking marshals sometimes, even though they are just doing their job. But now, if someone is being recorded, Loghdey hopes the screen will calm people down and encourage parking bye-law compliance, so they can sort out disputes peacefully.
In the UK, the CARMACAM cameras have been tested in many trials and most of the police forces use them. If body worn cameras get used as widely in South Africa as they are in the UK, life could be a lot safer, and not just for parking marshals. In the UK, people living in areas with these cameras have said that they feel safer.
The City of Cape Town Municipal Police are very interested in the cameras and participated in a demonstration of the system by Loghdey at his premises in the Cape Town CBD. “Our Municipal Police absolutely loved it,” he said. The “weight, form factor and CARMA Kiosk capability especially.”
The CARMA Kiosk is a management system for data, which Loghdey also bought from the UK. It has software which prevents recordings being tampered with. This makes sure that both the marshals and motorists are safe and compliant. Loghdey uses this to record “abuse by motorists and to prevent bad behaviour by parking marshals. It is a portable method of surveillance with which you could monitor progress in all respects,” he says.
In the weeks since the cameras started being used, Loghde says, “there has a 100% improvement on all fronts. The municipality is happy that we can now offer this service too.”
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