A Big Year for the Watchers

The protocol

The method is published before the walking starts, so that the result is a census and not an impression. Anyone with the same rules and a year can check it.

The boundary

The survey area is Census Tract 7, Durham County, North Carolina, as the Census Bureau draws it: 1.30 square miles, 4,059 residents, 2,327 housing units, 21.2 miles of named public street. I did not draw the line, which is the point — the Bureau's boundary can't be bent around blocks I find interesting, and the result stays comparable with any other tract in the country.

Coverage

I walk every named public street inside the boundary at least once, on foot, within one year of the first walk. A street is surveyed when its full length inside the boundary has been walked. Parking lots, alleys, and other service roads are surveyed from the nearest public street or sidewalk; I do not enter private property. The Durham Freeway crosses the tract and is surveyed from its overpasses and the streets beside it.

What counts

Each device is one individual: a pole carrying two cameras counts as two watchers. Only apparatus visible from public ground is counted, so the count is a minimum: back-yard cameras, interior cameras, and anything I fail to see are outside it. Fixed species (license plate readers, dome and bullet cameras, doorbell cameras, speed cameras) are censused. Mobile species — patrol-car license plate readers, body-worn cameras, phones raised to film — are logged as incidental sightings and kept out of the totals, because a census of things that move is an impression with a clipboard.

What gets recorded

For each sighting: the species, per the reference volume's classification; the count; the position; the mount (pole, building corner, gantry, door frame); what it faces; and the owner, where a sign, a logo, or a public record says so. Guesses are labeled as guesses.

Photography

Photographs are taken from public ground, and no people appear in frame. That is the whole rule. Street context stays in the picture — a watcher's habitat is part of the record.

The map feed

Every fixed sighting is entered into OpenStreetMap under the standard surveillance tags, using the DeFlock conventions for license plate readers. The live counts on this site and in the reference volume read from OpenStreetMap, so each walk moves the public map first and this site's numbers second. At the start of the year the public map showed zero watchers inside the tract.

Field notes

One dated entry per walk, published as written, usually within a day or two. Corrections are made in the open, in later notes.

The archive

One records-request thread runs alongside the walks. Once the census shows which agencies are collecting on these streets, I will request my own license plate reads from them under North Carolina public records law and publish what comes back, including any denials.

Running your own

A packaged version of this method — pick your tract, pull the same numbers, walk the same way — will follow once a few walks have tested the rules. The method above is enough to start with if you'd rather not wait.