Slashdot Mirror
British Traffic Wardens Issued CCTV Head Cameras
Rick writes "The Surveillance Society of Great Britain has taken another turn for the worse, as
traffic wardens in Eccles, Manchester are being issued with CCTV head sets and
given the legal power to impose fines of up to £80 for littering and other anti social behavior"
And if you don't have anything to hide, why object to us installing a camera in your home....
This ain't just a slippery slope. It's a fucking teflon ski hill.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
heres my take on it, i was born in kent and lived there for the first 8 years of my life, it seemed pretty safe, i then moved to a small village named pucklechurch near bristol, which wasn't that clean or safe, plenty of good drugs, under age drinking (all of which i participated in), high crime rate (we always knew who it was) and then from boredom came the younger generation with even more problems. at age 15 i moved to a city in china with the population of that of Australia today. shanghai being this city is very safe as i have often stumbled back at early hours of the morning piss drunk.
now what i've seen is that migrant workers coming from poorer regions are the cause of most of the street crime, the same for england, the immigrants after a better life for themselves, where would i live today? well i'm still in china almost 10 years later.
the camera's wont deter problems, they'll only cause an uprising. social change will. better education that isn't led by an agenda and plenty of things that keep younger people interested and challenged will stop a whole lot more.
only reason i participated in most of what i did in this small village, was from boredom.
give people back the right to make their own choice, how ironic is that from someone who chooses to live in a communist country? well I've seen the best of both worlds, and I've also found myself to have more control over what i can and cant do in communist china. especially in a protected city such as shanghai, oh and i rarely get bored, but then i work for 2 companies and run 2 of my own businesses.
The bottom line with this I believe is it's simply a way for councils to make more money. Currently they simply don't get enough money from the government, so they turn to unreasonably fining people. We've heard about people being fined over scraps of paper, councillors wanting to survey peoples homes to try and charge more council tax, and more similar stories. The councils are just getting desperate for money and it's horrible to watch.
Consider that it could even moderate overzealous law enforcement.
It could, but by an amazing coincidence, whenever anyone reports cases of overzealous law enforcement in the UK, investigation shows that for some strange reason none of the CCTV cameras that cover the area were working.
It's weird, that. You'd think with more CCTV cameras than pretty much anywhere else in the world, we'd be able to make them reasonably reliable by now.
As a resident of Eccles I can say that there is a massive problem with antisocial behaviour over this side of the city. The police have gone as far as to put a row of 30+ CCTV camera down the main road every 70ft apart. They have total blanket CCTV covereage of the area. The bad behaviour of the few nasty residents causes social problems for the rest of us, and it is about time someone did something about it.
I personally don't think that head mounted cameras are the way to go, but these cameras are more about stopping parking disputes for wrongly issued tickets. I know that the parking attendants are on a target based system, so are very likely to blanket ticket an area because there is no recource for the driver. I think these cameras will help this problem out a lot, and stop these idiots from fining a random vehicle just to make target. Believe me, a £40 ($80) parking fine for doing nothing wrong is not nice.
I am more concerned about the 100's of camera that appear over night covering the entire of the Eccles/Manchester region. There is some serious invasion of privicy going on that makes me less than comfortable. I did a small counting excercise while I travelled into work... I can see over 40 cameras during my work journey. Scary.
I say we should all ask for the footage of us on camera under the Data Protection Act and swamp the government/businesses with stupid amounts of administrative paperwork.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
Except that in that case, there should have been video footage. The fact that it strangely isn't available becomes far from a moot point, and instead an exacerbating one.
Ubiquitous CCTV, until the police do something illegal.