By Zheng Caixiong (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-05-14 07:25

SHENZHEN: Two casual workers hired by Shenzhen traffic police have been fired for allegedly peeping into apartments in a residential area through a video camera designed for monitoring traffic.

Shenzhen police said on Tuesday on its website the workers, surnamed Liang and Xie, were hired to monitor traffic.

However, when the workers found that one camera could be moved to view a residential area beside a bridge - the target of the traffic monitoring - they turned the camera onto people's homes.

Because the contents of some of the traffic cameras are also uploaded onto a website for people to know about traffic conditions, the video of the camera involved was also made public.

Since only a limited number of people have access to the contents of a video, the suspects were easily identified, police said.

The Shenzhen bureau of public security said yesterday at a press conference that the two will face punishments of fines or even detention.

The city launched an investigation on May 4 after a local newspaper informed the bureau that a traffic surveillance camera had been trained on bedrooms and bathrooms in the residential area in Luohu district, where more than 700 families live.

The police said they will now use cameras that operate only in a fixed position. The change will be completed by August.

No similar incident had been reported since 200,000 digital cameras were installed in the city in 2006, they said.

Shenzhen will also speed up the introduction of new legislation on the use of surveillance cameras, authorities said.

In Guangzhou, an office in charge of video content management, said only the police have control of the use of such cameras in the city.

There are more than 210,000 surveillance cameras in Guangzhou.