The Tampa “Smart CCTV” Experiment

In June 2001, a neighborhood in Tampa, Florida called Ybor City became the first urban area in the United States to be fitted with a "Smart CCTV" system. Visio-nics Corporation began a project with the Tampa Police Department to incorpo-rate the company's facial recognition technology (FRT), called FaceIt, into an existing 36-camera CCTV system covering several blocks along two of the main avenues. However, this "smart surveillance" experiment did not go as smoothly as its planners had hoped. After a two-year free trial period, the TPD abandoned the effort to integrate facial recognition with the CCTV system in August 2003, citing its failure to identify a single wanted individual. This essay chronicles the experi-ment with FRT in Ybor City and argues that the project's failure should not be viewed as solely a technical one. Most significantly, the failure of the Ybor City "Smart CCTV" experiment reveals the extent to which new surveillance technol-ogies represent sites of struggle over the extent and limits of police power in ad-vanced liberal democracies