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London 2006, Meet London 1984
Draape writes "Shoreditch TV is an experiment TV channel beaming live footage from the street into people's homes. According to the Telegraph
U.K. television will broadcast from 400 surveillance cameras on the streets, into people's homes. For now they are only showing it to 22,000 homes, but next year they plan on going national with the 'show'. They fly under the flag 'fighting crime from the sofa'."
There's a threshold though. If I do something stupid and 8 people see, I might shrug it off. If I do something stupid and 80 people see, I might not hang around that part of town. But if I do something stupid and 80,000 people see, then I might be scarred for life. It's just not meant to work that way.
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The TV programs in the UK must be pretty bad if they actually get ratings on that channel. I mean... other than the "nosey neighbor" - who is really going to sit there for an hour or more and watch people walking down the street? And how does advertising work? Will people walk by with a sign on their back for Nike and Pepsi? Maybe put a Pepsi machine in one of the camera shots? Anyway, my #1 question is what's the target audience? 50+ years old, single, unemployed people with nothing better to do in their lives than try to catch someone doing something "bad". I'm getting bored just thinking about how boring this would be.
What this really is, is an exercise in "grooming" the public to accept privacy invasion on an even greater scale.
CCTV cameras are known to have a definite effect on crime; they displace it to camera-free areas, where it obviously isn't anyone's problem. There was an incident a few years ago, along a road out of the city where every building is a shop, restaurant or pub. Some runt went around spraying graffiti on every establishment that was not CCTVed. The only images were a few blurred, grainy ones of him running from one shop to the next.
If the "experiment" is not universally opposed, the government will find a way to take it nationwide. The more affluent areas of every city will be filled with cameras that anyone can monitor. Crime will simply be displaced to the non-CCTV areas. Meanwhile, the public will gradually be getting used to the concept of never expecting to be able to go totally unobserved. The way will be paved for ever deeper intrusions into individuals' lives.
"Mummy, does Jesus watch you when you're on the toilet?"
"As long as he's watching channel 36, yes!"
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
As far as I am informed: The violence dropped just after the relaxing of the police enforced closing time of the pubs (which is only several years after the introduction of heavy surveilance of the general public). Main reason is probably that less drunks are the same place at the same time since they go home over a 2h period instead of a 5m period.
I wonder if advertisers will pay people to carry large signs as they walk through town?
We all know how crime was handled in the old south. Arrest the nearest black person. Worked especially well in rape cases cause everyone knows those niggers just can't keep their hands of white women right?
To combat this you have to have a legal system wich is "blind". It is the reason that justice statue has a blindfold.
The problem is that every police person can tell you it is a load of bullshit. If you see a group of black people in a poor area of london in an expensive car you know it is stolen.
Note here that the figure is that 50% of ARRESTS involve blacks. NOT stoppages. The only way people are arrested after being stopped is if they have been found to do something illegal.
What the story is effectivly saying is that the police shouldn't arrest so many black people. But how? Let them run because "oh yeah he done it but we are over our quota off blacks for this week". Arrest white people on made up charges?
Cause the horrible fact is that blacks just seem to commit more crimes or at least be caught more easily. But you can't say that.
This system is impartial. It just looks at the facts and flags a vehicle as suspicious or not.
In fact at its simplest it checks wether a vehicle has been stolen and then tells the police to pull it over.
if then it is found that in 50% of the cases the driver is black what the hell can you do about it.
In holland we got a similar case. Suriname (former colony with a largly black population) is a known traffic route for drugs smugglers. So customs check passengers on flights from Suriname more thoroughly then from other countries. Is this racist? Well yes and no. Obviously the majority of passengers from Suriname are black. Why aren't say asian passengers from Japan searched as well?
Because it ain't about racism. IF that was the case black passengers from japan would be searched extra as well. They are not.
The problem is that political correctness has made it impossible to accept any figures that suggest minorities are more involved with crime. This is just one extreme example.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Oftentimes, safety programs backfire, and make things less safe.
Examples:
1) Pickpocketing was an issue in some large urban subway. So to do the public a favor, they put up signs telling people to look out for pickpockets. Guess what? Right behind those signs was where the pickpockets would hang out. People would look at the sign, and pat their pocket where there wallet was, which in turn told the pickpockets exactly where their wallet was. Easy target! Pickpocketing became much easier as a result, and the signs were taken down.
2) Near where I live there is a highway that goes over a mountain that is occasionally covered in thick fog. They did a big study and spent something like $20mil on these fancy lights on the sides of the road. Well guess what? Being that the drivers were more comfortable and felt "safe" because the could see the side of the road, they would drive faster than they should, and its more dangerous to drive on that road now after they made it more safe.
3) Anti-lock brakes. I won't get into this because people here do not agree that increased friction between the road and tires with centrifugal force increases the likelihood of a rollover and fatal accident.