A municipal surveillance monitoring fail in Phuket

Jan. 12, 2010

Municipal surveillance continues to take off, and with more cameras means you need more people to monitor the cameras (if you're going to try to get great value out of these cameras). Over the years, we've seen a number of interesting attempts to get the public involved to monitor these. There have been successes in the UK, but there was an attempt in Texas to monitor border cameras that went no where.

So I'm reading about Phuket, Thailand's public CCTV system in this article from the Phuket Gazzette and saw that they want to get disable citizens to do some of the monitoring. I think on one level that this is a great idea. Disabled citizens deserve jobs too, and for some disable persons, this could be a potential job. Now here's the catch: The CCTV monitoring station is on the fourth floor of Phuket's police building. Most of the applicants are wheelchair bound or otherwise can't climb stairs. And of course there's no elevator up to the surveillance monitoring room.

Chalk that up to a planning failure. Let's hope they can install an elevator, move the room to a ground floor or find some other solution to allow the disabled to serve the city. However, I'm not optimistic based on the comments of the group representing these disabled persons, who said they hadn't even heard of the project!

-Geoff