INTELLIGENT pedestrian surveillance (IPS) systems promise to spot potential crimes before you or I would realise anything was amiss. And if the technology takes off, it could put an end to a long-standing problem that has dogged closed circuit (CCTV) systems from the beginning, as Jenny Hogan has written (快猫短视频, 12 July, p 4). There are too many cameras 鈥� a million in the UK 鈥� and too few pairs of eyes to keep track of them.
I raised this issue with Home Office community safety minister Hazel Blears. She told me that the Home Office is aware that imaging software allied to CCTV can be a powerful tool for tackling crime.
The best example of this is the use of automatic number plate recognition to record vehicle registrations and flag up any of concern to the authorities. Illegal drugs worth more than 拢100,000, more than 300 stolen vehicles and 拢715,000 in stolen goods have so far been seized in Home Office pilot programmes. And more than 3000 people have been arrested, the majority for serious crimes, she said.
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The IPS system looks as if it may have similar potential 鈥� even if it makes people slightly uneasy since it is supposed to work by identifying any behaviour which is even subtly nonconforming. But its task is far more technically challenging than identifying vehicle registrations.
I shall be asking the Home Office for updates on the pilot IPS schemes operating at present.
OVER 35 years ago, a constituent came to me: a distraught mother who had been, I believe, wrongly charged with shaking her baby to death. Since then I have been interested in 鈥渟haken-baby syndrome鈥� and the possibility that it could be confused with the rare blood disease haemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH) (快猫短视频, 7 June, p 4).
The junior minister at the Department of Health with responsibility for community care, Stephen Ladyman, has now assured me that such confusion is unlikely these days. Any GP faced with a child showing the very severe symptoms associated with HLH 鈥� including high fever, low blood platelet count, and enlarged liver and spleen 鈥� would be likely to refer him or her to a consultant haematologist or paediatrician, who would already be aware of the disease.
Ladyman added that bleeding in the brain and especially in the eyes are rare in HLH, though strong clues to child abuse, while low blood count is typical of HLH but not of shaken-baby syndrome. However, it is also true that no single test exists for HLH and that some children who have the disease show only a few of the symptoms, making diagnosis more difficult.
All I hope is that never again will the mother of an HLH victim have to go through the agonies of self-blame suffered by the mother who came to me all those years ago: she was only just prevented from taking her own life.
