Quote:
Originally Posted by bomberjet
I was looking at streetview and there's already a camera for the traffic management centre right beside the tower.
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Cameras are for more than traffic management. Typically those have a wide field of view to get the big picture of what's going on.
License plate readers on the other hand have a narrow field of view and look in specific spots. (My understanding is that Winnipeg police already have several camera-equipped patrol cars, reading all the licence plates they go by and feeding them into a database. Searches for expired licenses or expired insurance or vehicles belonging to persons of interest can be done later.)
Down in the Excited States there's a growing industry of private companies with networks of license plate readers selling data to insurance companies, law enforcement, corporate investigators, etc..
Now automated facial recognition is taking off. Both Britain and China have made recent high-profile arrests after cameras picked wanted people out of huge festival crowds. Osborne Village, The Forks and the new TNS courtyard would be ideal camera locations. An unknown face can be assigned an ID to tie sightings together in a database.
Police or corporate investigators will be able to retroactively tail someone years later with a quick purchase from facial and licence plate reader databases. (When I was in the Soviet Union in the '80s, there were what looked like mini air traffic control towers in major intersections and along highways, doing all this with much lower-tech methods.)
We'll be seeing a lot more cameras than the traffic management ones. So fear not; the tower won't go to waste.