Kharkiv’s law enforcers and bureaucrats have joined forces to reeducate the populace by means of video surveillance. While some cities have decided to institute stiff fines to dissuade people from nasty habits like littering, the Kharkiv authorities decided to go one further by exposing wrongdoers to public humiliation.
City Council Secretary Hennadiy Kernes told a press conference that in order to ensure law-and-order and cleanliness, from now on increasing numbers of video cameras will be installed to film all misdemeanors. For example, a careless individual is filmed littering on the street, and some of the footage is later shown on local television. The miscreant is then tracked down and ordered to sweep the street as an administrative punishment. There is already a video surveillance program in place to install 250 video cameras at a height of six to eight meters in certain downtown areas, such as Sumska Street and the alleys of the central park. Flying police squads will be stationed nearby and when alerted by a duty officer, they will be able to react rapidly.
At the moment law enforcers are doing preparatory work and laying cables to the surveillance points, so the cameras will appear en masse in the city in about a month. Right now about 20 video cameras are operating in the city’s busiest areas. Besides capturing wrongdoers on film, they help determine causes of road accidents and track stolen cars. Their signals are continuously recorded in police stations.
The project is being funded by the municipal and regional budgets. According to Pavlo Yanenko, First Deputy Chief of the Kharkiv Regional Police, about 100 cameras will be functioning in the city by the end of the year. The project is expected to assist law enforcers, who have a difficult time monitoring congested public places.
One of the first places that the police intend to place under surveillance is the shopping center near the Akademik Barabashov subway station. This marketplace, created 10 years ago, has now grown into Ukraine’s largest shopping area measuring 60 ha (about 20 soccer fields) and employing 60,000 people of 39 ethnic backgrounds. The market is now under reconstruction and is gradually changing into a huge covered chain-store shopping center. By 2008, Barabashove will be Europe’s largest covered shopping center. Hundreds of thousands of people shop there every day. Law enforcers find it difficult to keep the peace in this round-the-clock shopping center. Word has it that Barabashove was designed as a large-area market, so the city’s entire police force cannot cordon it off when it is rounding up illegal migrants or other law-breakers. Video cameras will definitely ease policing work here.
Apart from filming miscreants, the cameras will also help identify people who call the police from emergency call boxes. This is another innovation introduced by the Kharkiv police, which was borrowed from their Russian counterparts. From now on, when something happens far from a telephone booth, and an eyewitness or victim has no cell phone to call the police, they can quickly get in touch with law enforcers by pushing a “police emergency call button.” This device is a red metal box with a cell phone inside. Each of these devices, valued at 1,500 hryvnias, is designed in such a way that no vandals or thieves can get inside the box. Everyone who uses an emergency call box will be filmed by a video camera.
The device is simple to operate: one button to make the call and another to talk to an officer on duty. The red boxes will be marked with a number of white stripes and indirect lighting for better visibility at night. Law enforcers are planning to update the call box by installing a multifunctional button, so that one push will summon rescuers, fire-fighters, or an ambulance.
There is an idea to install a video camera right inside the box in order to identify a caller easily. The first six call boxes are being installed in downtown Kharkiv. Funds from the municipal and regional budgets will be used to install a total of 500 devices. Yanenko says there are no call boxes like this anywhere else in Ukraine, and law enforcers in other cities have shown great interest in the Kharkiv experience.
