EFFORTS are being encouraged to ensure that most business areas in the city of Dar es Salaam have reliable street lighting as a way to remove the darkness on which hoodlums often rely upon to mug those who pass alone at night. While there is talk of installing CCTV equipment in most street lighting zones, chances of actually curbing crime are not that high as such equipment store information or images that have to be put to manual scan for any impression to be made. An improvement is relevant. A direct method of improving the use of images recorded by CCTV is to connect artificial intelligence equipment to at least a zone with CCTV camera, an AI pool of sorts. That connection will avail an opportunity for anyone harassed or otherwise aggressed on the road to take to the nearest police station and state the time of such action, which would facilitate the reviewing of relevant CCTV images of that moment, or range of minutes.

When the complainant points at a particular image as the scene of that aggression, images of the visible or presumed culprits are then fed into an artificial intelligence device where reconciliation with national identification data can be performed; by elimination it fingers the culprit.

For one thing, such acceleration on finding culprits for incidents of crime could lay the foundation stone for crime becoming history, in the sense that the same can be done on individual housing, where the link with a network data centre can be designed to work in like manner as a toll number. 

A house CCTV is directly connected to the pool, such that if a burglar comes along and might not quite have noticed where the CCTV is placed, or an auxiliary CCTV picks images, he would still be nailed. This could reduce down complaints about lack of investigation, efficiency etc.

If for instance robbers disable CCTV in one home or an adjacent one as well to commit a crime, their incoming or exit would still be recorded by other installed units in the street, so long as the complainant can at least cite the hour or space of time in which such incident occurred. 

So long as any CCTV device in that area would be working and they are connected to the pool centre at the neatest police station, or accessible at major police stations anywhere, it would be hard for criminals to disable the recording sufficiently not to be captured in one of them, at that time. This sort of facility would be a visible disaster for law breakersa and the best scenario for law abiding citizens, and indeed, a blessing of technologu!