Beyond broken cameras — the surveillance tech needed to protect SA women

Across the globe, CCTV cameras and AI software are being used to scour tens of thousands of hours of footage to help find the missing. It is time for South Africa to do the same.

D Khosa is a Professor at Unisa’s College of Law, School of Criminal Justice. She holds a PhD in Police Science.

Elizabeth Moselakgomo left her house in Rhodesfield, Kempton Park, on the afternoon of Wednesday, 9 September, to go for a run. Her eight-year-old daughter was at home, waiting. When her mother did not come back, it was that child who phoned the relatives, and the relatives who went to the police.

Officers searched and made inquiries at hospitals and mortuaries and turned up nothing. On Saturday, 12 September, her body was found behind a hotel in the suburb, a short walk from her front door. Her family identified her at the Germiston mortuary on the Monday. She was 38. The people who loved her called her Tsontso.

It took three days to find her. Rhodesfield is not a remote place. It is minutes from OR Tambo, in the province that has more cameras trained on it than any other in South Africa.

In April, the Seoul Metropolitan Government in South Korea commenced the roll-out of an artificial intelligence video search system across all 25 of its districts. It can search in the order of 123,000 cameras at once and work through 100 hours of footage in about 10 minutes. The reason the city gave for installing the system was to shorten the search for missing persons.

The same city runs a safe-return-home app tied to its municipal cameras, so that a woman walking home at night can be watched until she is inside and can get a control room operator to focus on her by shaking her phone.

India took a different route after the Delhi gang-rape case in 2012 and built what its Safe Cities programme calls safety islands, which are lit points along a route fitted with a camera and a button wired to a response vehicle.

I’m uneasy about using a dead woman to argue about procurement, and I want to say so plainly before I do it. But decisions like these get taken in the weeks when people are still angry, and then not again for years. So let me be specific about what I want bought, what it costs and whose signature it needs.

Start with what we have already paid for. In a written reply to the Gauteng Legislature earlier this year, the provincial government confirmed that R124.5-million had been spent on installing 960 CCTV cameras, and that 89 sites were non-functional, affecting 269 cameras. While the DA claimed this meant about 28% of the network was offline, the department dismissed the characterisation as misleading, maintaining that repair teams were actively fixing the failed sites. I'll leave them to that argument.

What neither side disputes is the reasons the cameras went down: vandalism, water damage to batteries and faulty inverters. A good share of the network failed on the same battery-and-inverter kit the rest of us bought to survive load shedding, and nobody costed in the replacement cycle.

The province puts ongoing maintenance at R12-million to R15-million a year.