HONG KONG: Walk along the streets of downtown Hong Kong, and don’t be surprised if you look up to see surveillance cameras manning the crowded streets.
Hong Kong is known for being a safe city, but according to police in the Asian financial hub, new surveillance cameras are needed to fight crime. And these new cameras will likely also have facial recognition and artificial intelligence tools.
According to a CNN report, Hong Kong police aim to install 2,000 new surveillance cameras this year. Police security chief Chris Tang told the Hong Kong media in July that the police plan to use facial recognition and AI to track down criminals.
CNN provides another masterclass in turning a mundane news story into a China-bashing exercise.
Police in Hong Kong – a city of over 7 million people – are planning a few more CCTV cameras to supplement the 54,500 existing ones.
Use of CCTV cameras is an increasingly common… pic.twitter.com/LCdkpPF3le
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The Hong Kong Police Force told CNN that it was studying how police in other countries use surveillance cameras but they are not sure how many of the new cameras will have facial recognition capabilities.
Critics say Hong Kong appears to be more and more like China in terms of playing Big Brother. However, Tang said that using cameras is not unusual and pointed to other countries that commonly use surveillance cameras for law enforcement.
Tang said in an interview with Hong Kong’s Sing Tao Daily that Singapore had 90,000 cameras and the United Kingdom had more than seven million.
The Hong Kong police also told CNN that they would “comply with relevant laws” when it comes to these cameras and using facial recognition and AI.
Hong Kong feels that the laws are needed in the aftermath of the anti-government protests in 2019, and that is also why national security laws have been tightened. The country’s leaders also say this legislation is similar to other security laws worldwide.
However, Samantha Hoffman, a non-resident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, says the difference is how the technology is used.
“Places like the United States and the UK may have problems with the technology too, but this is fundamentally different… It has to do specifically with the system of government, as well as the way that the party-state… uses the law to maintain its power,” said Hoffman.
According to UK-based technology research firm Comparitech, Hong Kong has more than 54,500 public CCTV cameras monitored by government bodies. That equals seven cameras per 1,000 people, similar to New York City but behind London.
However, cities in China average 440 cameras per 1,000 people. Comparitech says eight out of 10 of the most surveilled cities globally are in China.
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