The camera cops

Gu Hua spends his day doing his job, watching television. Actually he watches a wall of 28 television screens. Gu is an assistant police officer working in the Security Camera Monitoring Section at the Nanmatou Police Station in Pudong New Area. He is one of the best of the watchers there and his cameras helped bring about the arrest of 10 major criminal suspects last year.

In Nanmatou there are more than 400 street surveillance cameras, not including the cameras in the metro system and those in commercial and residential areas. Nanmatou spreads over 4 square kilometers and there are cameras installed at every street intersection.

"We caught more than 20 suspects last year just with security cameras. The cameras have changed the way we work a lot. They have helped lift the detection rates and are preventing crime - there were fewer cases of people stealing scooters last year," Wang Zhaofa, the senior officer at the Nanmatou Police Station, told the Global Times.

Officer Wang said that the security cameras were also helping police patrols which had had to cover more ground with fewer people. A few years ago there were hardly any surveillance cameras in the area. "Before 2008 we had just 20 security cameras but a lot more were introduced for the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai," Wang said.

A conference on security in the city last month heard that there were now 300,000 surveillance cameras installed throughout Shanghai and by the end of this year there will be another 100,000 cameras looking over the streets of the city.

"Shanghai is one of the leading cities launching and using security cameras in China," Wang said.

On patrol daily

Gu Hua and his colleagues each carry out two patrols with their cameras every day. They shift from one camera to another to check the street scenes. And each has a remote control to rotate the cameras and zoom in to look more closely at faces or objects.

"The camera can turn 360 degrees and can focus on an object 500 meters away," Gu said. As well as the 400-plus cameras the Nanmatou police have they can access the pictures from security cameras installed in banks, buildings and residential compounds.

Local police stations share their pictures with other police departments, like traffic police and investigators when asked. Members of the public can also ask to see certain security pictures if they report a crime to the police, officer Wang confirmed.

The police say that 26 percent of the cameras they use are vital for their work. "We pay extra attention to these because this is where there is a bigger potential for crimes or disturbances," said Zhang Guohua, the officer in charge of the surveillance cameras in the Nanmatou area.

"There is a camera near every subway station and we have these pictures on screen all the time because there are a lot of scooters and bikes parked there and there have been a lot of thefts reported. There is also a camera at the entrance to a hospital in case there are problems with patients' families and doctors," Zhang said.

According to the police, when they see anything suspicious the camera officers will contact the nearest police on the street who usually arrive quickly and can calm situations down and prevent major problems from developing.

Gu took the Global Times through some incidents where the cameras had played a vital role. "Vendors set up snack booths at the intersection of Pusan Road and Pudong Road South late at night in summer. We usually monitor the markets and I was on shift when a big brawl erupted there," Gu said.

"There had been a confrontation between a waiter and a customer. The customer was a large strong middle-aged man who suddenly picked up a chair and swung it at the young waiter. He didn't say anything and seemed to be provoking the young man. The two were separated but we saw the young man taking out his cell phone and making a call. We thought that was a bad sign for he was probably calling his friends to come and back him up," Gu recalled.

He said that he then summoned police patrols to the area immediately. They grabbed the two men and took them to the police station. But the matter didn't end there.

"Soon afterwards a group of men who had been called by the waiter arrived at the market and confronted another group who were friends of the middle-aged man. They began shouting at each other but soon a big brawl broke out and we ordered more police there to bring the situation under control quickly. If we had had to wait for bystanders to call us, someone could have been seriously injured or worse," Gu said.