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."

Comments

Re:Why all the concern?

[I Be Hatin']

Good points, however I think you're underestimating the probability that criminals and law enforcement will adapt to the presence of cameras.

When a criminal breaks into a house and grabs a stereo system, there's very little that can be done after the fact if there were no witnesses. The police won't go after a minor property crime unless they have an easy lead.

Okay, so there's a camera, and you get a description of the guy: he's a white guy, about 6' tall, dressed in all black, with long brown hair. Now what? How many white guys are there who are about 6' tall (note: he could've been wearing a wig, and can obviously change clothes)? You're basically no further ahead than you were, and the cops still won't investigate. Of course, it will help solve (some) spontaneous crimes, but any premeditated crime will just need to be planned a wee bit better.

If Buford T. Justice has a penchant for bullying and threatening teenage girls, recording devices would make the pattern easy to confirm, and modern printing technology would make his pink slip easy to produce.

Since Sgt. Justice knows where the cameras are/aren't, he's going to just bully these girls when the cameras aren't on (when he's off-duty, or outside of the camera's view, after he's turned the camera off, etc.). He'd have to be a complete idiot to know he's being filmed and still do it.

The solution to the potential abuses may actually be very straightforward: Watch the watchers. Turn the cameras on the people who are charged with using the cameras to protect us. Make their every observation a matter of public record, and then let the usefully paranoid among us go through that record with a fine-toothed comb, asking the uncomfortable questions that the authorities don't want to have to answer.

Straightforward in theory, but difficult to implement in practice. The public would need to control the cameras, and I can't see that going over well with law enforcement. Cops usually don't like the Internal Affairs cops, so imagine what they might do to "citizen IA cops". It also opens up whole new avenues for abuse. Imagine a criminal pretending to be one of these "usefully paranoid" so that he can get a better idea of current police tactics/preparations. It seems that in order to prevent abuse, you'd have to watch the watchers of the watchers, and then watch the people watching them, etc. Everybody-watching-everybody all the time would be the only way it could work. (For the record, I volunteer to watch the hottie who lives next door to me.)