Mexico Uses Deaf People to Monitor Surveillance Cameras

In the fall of 2012, the governor of Oaxaca, Mexico, decided to kill two birds with one stone. He hired 20 people who could not hear or speak to monitor footage from the state capital's 230 surveillance cameras. The move didn't just provide to jobs to people who normally can't get them in Mexico. It also improved the city's surveillance system.The video footage is silent, and deaf monitors are both capable of reading lips and less easily distracted than officers who can hear by other things happening in the command center.

The deaf monitors aren't cops. They don't carry guns and aren't sworn officers. But according to a 2012 report from The New York Times, they have helped solve at least one murder, as well as alerted patrolmen to a variety of other crimes, some of them serious, many of them petty.