Slashdot Mirror
London Police Equipped With 360-Degree Cams
OriginalArlen writes, "In a story so surreal I had to check the primary source, the Register reports that the (London, UK) Metropolitan Police are trying out the use of eight tiny cams, mounted in the police helmet, to provide 360-degree evidence gathering in the event that an officer witnesses a crime. The press release also gives more evidence of the stealth spread of ubiquitous ANPR systems across the country as a spin-off 'benefit' to the London car congestion-charging scheme, which is likely to be rolled out across the country in the next few years. Are we already living in a Panopticon Society?" According to this report from the information commissioner for Great Britain, yep.
This won't really change a thing in favour of the citizens. It will be used to cover their backs when the police doing things right (which is most of the time), raise a bit of revenue when they sell it off for a britains-dumbest-criminals-type tv show, but don't forget the poor brazilian guy who was executed on the tube last year. The police "lost" the videos for that one, and the tube system is already wall-to-wall with cameras for our "security".
This message was scanned by European governments and contains no terrorism.
If a cop's got one of these on and he does something out of line, you can just look at the tape, whereas otherwise it might just be your word against his.
The key to a "Panoptic" society is that you can be watched at any time, but not always all the time, and you don't know at any given moment whether you're being watched or not. Thus you turn everyone into paranoid little crazies, easily controlled and turned against one another.
As for just looking at the tape, consider the Brazilian guy the British police shot a while back. Police say he was running and leaping turnstiles, witnesses say he wasn't running and he even stopped to pay his fare. But hey, there's closed-circuit cameras everywhere. Let's go to the tapes.... oh wait, looks like all the cameras were turned off that day! Wow! what a coincidence! (the "non-existent" tapes later turned up)
Anonymity. In the good old days (mostly imaginary) people knew who everyone else was. People had met the police officers before as they cycled past doing whatever it was they did back then. They knew you because they knew your mum and saw you growing up. They knew the local trouble makers, as did everyone else. Collectively troublemakers were kept in place because nobody tolerated it.
Now nobody trusts their police & knows little of them other than what they see in the media (which is largely non-flattering). Why should people trust someone they don't know to be "doing the right thing"(tm)? This doesn't just apply to police officers. Nobody knows whether that guy kicking off on the bus is just a local idiot, or likely to stab them in the face. Even though the "good" people outnumber the crazy 50:1, individually we don't know that. We don't want to be the one to move first & find ourselves without backup.
An example: I was walking through the city centre a while back & there was a large crowd of people. In the middle a police officer was attempted to arrest a woman & handcuff her. She was screaming and kicking at him to get away. Did anyone help? No. They stood and watched.
Another recent post has shown that when faced with the opposite situation, the exact same thing happened. Nobody moved. This is not about respect for police or lack of it, it is about people not being able to decide on the correct action. It's about lack of information to make an informed choice.
Yes, it would be great if the police were implicitly trusted, but nobody works like that. We trust what we know.
Incidentally, I helped the policeman with the arrest. He seemed calmer.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer