Moscow officials who identify squatter and other violations in real estate will be provided with miniature video cameras broadcasting online video, a measure designed to reduce the number of abuses during inspections.
Moscow police officers, employees of the Traffic Management Center, and controllers in ground transport and metro are already using miniature video recorders. Now they will equip employees of the State Inspectorate for Control over the Use of Real Estate Objects (GIN), it follows from the tender documentation of the Department for Competition Policy of Moscow, published on the website of state purchases. A special mobile device is attached to the inspector’s clothing, it must be turned on during the inspection and broadcast sound and video to the Unified Data Storage Center in Moscow, where data from other Moscow video cameras is collected. In this case, the inspector will have to wear a special badge warning others about the ongoing video surveillance.
The starting price of the competition is just over RUB 76 million. For this fee, the contractor of the mayor’s office must not only provide 200 online video recorders, but also establish the transmission of a video stream from them.
The GIN monitors Moscow non-residential real estate, the use of land plots, and is looking for a squatter construction.
“Portable video surveillance systems are designed to increase the transparency of control and inspection activities, as well as to protect the inspection staff from possible unlawful encroachments,” said a representative of the Moscow Information Technology Department. In addition, the records of inspections are needed for training and advanced training of inspectors, he added: “Also, video recorders will allow monitoring the actions of the GIN employees.”
“These inspectors visit and check the state of urban planning infrastructure, often without the participation of the owners,” says Dmitry Maltsev, partner at Platforma Legal. “Usually they do not enter buildings, they just look to see if they have built an additional floor somewhere or if they have opened a hotel where it is not supposed to.”
The GIN did not respond to Vedomosti’s request.
“The need for such video recorders may be partly caused by the issues of ensuring the safety of inspectors, but this is obviously not a primary task,” said Pavel Ikkert, managing partner of the law firm “Ikkert and Partners”. “The main thing is to reduce the corruption-generating factor at the level of inspectors, that is, inspectors who go directly to the facilities, communicate with tenants, and record the facts of violations on their part.” If, during the entire inspection, the inspector’s actions are recorded and sent to a remote server in real time, then this, according to the customer, should increase control over his actions, including preventing bribes from being received, Ikkert notes.
“Most likely, video recorders will be used for internal self-supervision over the activities of inspectors. Thus, it will be possible to find out whether the inspector has physically reached the desired object in order to exclude the execution of the conclusions blindly, “- said Maltsev. According to him, the GIN already uses high-tech solutions, such as drones, in its activities.
In Russia, the market for recorders worn over clothing began to develop in 2013–2014, when such systems became demanded by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in preparation for the Olympics, says Eldar Murtazin, a leading analyst at Mobile Research Group: “Their sales in the public sector amount to tens of thousands of units per year, but there is no need to talk about demand from private and corporate users yet ”. Interest in such devices on the part of municipal structures may increase as their cost decreases, Murtazin believes: “The well-known purchases of registrars allow us to conclude that in Moscow, the police and other services are now using about 20,000 personal registrars.”
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