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Surveillance Cameras in Britain Not Effective?
zymurgy_cat writes "An interesting piece in The Christian Science Monitor questions whether or not the 4 million plus cameras in Britain are effective in deterring crime. It touches upon the usual issues of privacy, who has access to the tapes, and so forth. Despite this, people still seem to prefer the cameras."
If I'd just committed a double murder, or cleaned out a jeweller's in the heist of the century, then I might actually be worried about cameras monitoring my every move.
As it is, I lead a life that is infinitely more boring than the scenarios listed above, and I am therefore of the opinion that if people want to watch me walking to the store at 10pm to grab a bottle of milk, they are more than welcome. Why should I care who's watching me if I have nothing to hide? And aren't cameras just an extension of any authority watching me? What's next? Policeman on the streets shouldn't look at the public as it is an infringement of civil liberties?
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
If it is not reducing crime, perhaps it would have been wiser to put more police on the streets?
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Well, you *do* have "Big Brother" looking over your shoulder, all the time. Or perhaps you don't have policemen on the streets where you live?
It turns out that Northeastern University has decided to post pictures of a post-Superbowl riot near the campus of Northeastern University. The intent seems to be to identify the rioters and vandals who destroyed cars and property. It seems that officials at Northeastern believe that the rioters may be somehow affiliated with the university (and few dispute that idea).
As of now, Northeastern's web site only has a couple dozen photographs of vandalism in action. But they do have videos from nearby video cameras... it may just be a matter of time before they post some video clips.
Clearly these rioters were both stupid and committed crimes, so there's no need to debate the criminal aspects of their activity.
But is it OK for anyone to secretly videotape activities in the street? Is it OK for Northeastern to pin their students based on video and film taken by random observers?
Monitoring cameras are not about democracy vs. oppression, they are about eliminating the tragedy of the commons.
Take speeding: when you speed, you save some journey time. When others speed, they endanger your life. Cameras on the road (as seen recently in France) tell individuals "your acts are not cost-free", and so they behave better.
Britain is a pretty sad place to live in, but this has nothing to do with cameras and a lot to do with geography and history. The explosion of cameras in public places may not have eliminated crime, but they appear to have kept it in check, despite rising drug use, increasing poverty in many areas, etc.
I have to vote in favour of the cameras: it's one of those cases where the common need for decent behaviour in public places overrides the individual's right to privacy. I've often thought that in other countries - like Belgium, where I live - surveillence cameras would be a good thing, cutting down on the petty crime: bag theft, broken car windows, men pissing in public, muggings, etc. which make the average citizen feel insecure and end up voting for right-wing parties.
Ironically, better public behaviour is probably better for democracy, not the reverse, since historically extremist governments rise from situations of uncertainty, not from stable societies. Crime waves push people to accepting extreme leaders in the name of law and order.
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Does it worry me? Fuck no. I'd PREFER a cop on every street corner watching EVERYONE. Unlike most of the people around here I don't have some sort of paranoid view of cops that says they're all just out to get me. My grandfather was a cop and I've grown up around cops. Believe me, most cops seriously don't give a shit who you are or what you're doing until you commit a crime.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
In the US in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a perception that street crime was on the increase and I think muggings became somewhat common, even in predominantly middle class areas in large cities. The late 80s and very early 90s saw a rise in "carjacking", causing even those who were merely transiting through high-density urban areas to become potential victims.
Since then these phenomnena or at least the reporting seems to have gone down. Personal experience working and visiting New York City and Boston and extensive walking trips at night seems to have backed this up; we never even saw people we'd consider threatening, let alone getting mugged.
Is street crime (muggings, robbery, etc) a more common occurance in middle class areas of Britain?
I was robbed last Saturday afternoon in the Tesco supermarket in Eastleigh (Hampshire, England), losing the electric kettle that I'd just bought from another shop (crime #1377/04). Basically I put it down for a minute and it was gone. It only cost about $25, but the same criminal may well go on to steal from hundreds more people.
The crime happened in a shop with security cameras, within a shopping mall with security cameras, within a town centre with more security cameras.
I know when the theft occurred and I gave a description within minutes to representatives of the store, mall and police. I even visited the mall's security centre, with a duplicate of the stolen kettle in an identical bag, and spoke to the staff who watch the video feeds.
Everyone denied having any useful video information and the police representative at their call centre was friendly but dismissive.
I don't know what security cameras are really for, but they don't seem to be useful in fighting crime.
I think Westminster's system is one of the most effective. Their area covers some very high crime areas (leicester square, oxford circus). They claim a 51% decrease in street crime and a 12% increase in crime clearup rates after installing a vast CCTV system.
It's mainly used to better target the limited number of police available - it's not just about deterrence and after-the-fact clear up , it's well enough integrated and implemented that they can spot pickpockets and muggers as they move in to commit a crime and direct nearby police to arrest them.
I think that a lot of people who don't live with CCTV (and haven't seen all the British fly on the wall docus about its use) misunderstand the practice.
Typically, CCTV takes one of two forms:
In either sense, it's not really surveillance in the way the one usually thinks of it. The cameras are there, but practically all of the footage never gets watched. Your movements aren't tracked. As for voyeurism, if you do something in a public place then it's probably pretty public anyway. I'm not a proponent of the "But if you've got nothing to hide" point of view, I just don't think that CCTV as it's mostly used in the UK is an invasion of privacy. There is a difference between being watched and being monitored/tracked. British citizens in public places may be almost constantly watched, but they're certainly not monitored.
Now, a massive face-tracking database, that would be different. But that's not an issue of direct surveillance, that's a question of how data is linked together and used by powerful organisations. In reality, most of those cameras are not linked together in some kind of all-powerful network across the country. A very significant proportion are in fact operated by private companies on their own premises: not by Big Brother at all.
You missing something important about the speed camera debate; speeding does not cause accidents in any great way. The vast majority of accidents are caused by bad or agressive driving, driver error or road conditions.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing agaisnt 30-limit cameras, as speed matters when hitting a pedestrian. But on the motorway and main roads, it's a revenue generator.
It's also counter-productive. I'd rather have less cameras and more police cars (marked and unmarked), as the humans can pull drivers over for the afore mentioned bad driving, which a camera cannot. So you drive like a bitch provided you know where to slow down for the cameras.
PS I have nothing against them at accident hotspots. The only thing cameras do is slow drivers down for 100 meters. In the right place, that can be useful.
I think most people fear this camera creep, because right now it concentrates the power of surveillance in the hands of the minority - the police and/or private security firms, at a time when the major western governments are at the low point with public trust.
I too hate surveillance and consider it an invasion of privacy, but I would relent on one condition - that instead of having only a minority do the surveillance, allow everyone to have full access to all public camera footage, in real time. Open it all up to public scrutiny, and you're bound to have a thousand times as many eyes watching, plus you get the added benefit of knowing that since everyone is watching everyone else, corruption is less likely to occur in the system. This scenario also prevents any future totalitarian government from usurping the system for its own ends, because the system will be in the hands of everyone, not just a privileged few. How many current politicians do you think would support such a system? I'd wager not many, precisely because then THEY would be put in the spotlight.
Any politician who supports surveillance camera technology should be mandated to be under surveillance themselves, at all times, and I say this from a perspective of running for politics this year myself (www.neteffect.org.au). And no, I don't advocate surveillance cameras, because I think the right to privacy and anonymity outweighs any benefit in cutting down crime.
Visceral Psyche Films
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
a) A private corporation who don't go through the same level of security vetting that even a minor civil servant does.
and b) A bunch of foreigners who we might well have a disagreement with tomorrow. I don't trust the civil service 100%, but (having worked within that organisation once) I trust them 100% more than some random for profit stinky (especialy in EDS's case) corporation.
Don't know if EDS still have that contract - doesn't matter, if they don't, some other untrustworthy bunch will.
Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn
Footage can prove innocence as well as guilt. FWIW, I don't object to mandatory DNA sampling either.
Note how many wrongly imprisoned people have been freed by DNA evidence. Tech works both ways.
you realize the stats you used for london, was london CANADA, right?
There are a number of theories as to why punishment is justified for crimes. Two of the major ones are utilitarian and retributive theories.
Utilitarianism has as its goal the maximization of wealth for the society as a whole. That's not just monetary wealth, but well-being in general. Under this theory, punishment is not related as much to the moral culpability of the criminal as under other theories -- it would justify punishing someone wrongly in order to pacify society as a whole.
Economic theorists believe in deterrence, but there's not a lot of evidence out there to show that harsher crimes actually deter well.
Retributive theorists see punishment as somehow correcting an imbalance between the criminal and the victim... not just revenge, but taking away a 'benefit' gained by the criminal by punishing him. There are a lot of arguments against this sort of theory... but it may be how many people intuitively see criminal justice.
There is also the idea of simple incapacitation as a rationale for punishment, when it's imprisonment, for instance. Some people believe that the drop in crime rates over the last 20-30 years has been mostly due to the increased use of prisons and the simple incapacitative effect it has on crime.
All of these factors enter into criminal justice, and people argue about which rationales are more important than the others, but one thing is pretty clear -- we don't believe so strongly in deterrence that we're willing to forgo the requirement of moral culpability in the criminal, and punish him anyway for deterrence. In most cases, we require that he actually know he did something wrong in order to justify punishment.
Of course, this is just talking about punishment, not about ex ante modes of deterrence like cameras...
Exactly. Just like my tax files were being managed by EDS, an effing American Corporation with a piss poor employee reationship record. Not that I care it's a Yankee company...
Rule #1 -- NEVER trust an American company to do the "Right Thing(TM)". Even when they do, it for the wrong reasons.
Rule #2 -- See Rule #1.
I an American and I love my country. That doesn't mean I've got to love the corporate mindset.