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"
That would be "behaviour", mate.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
Ubiquitous remote cams on the other hand are. This is only recording what the guy is actually seeing anyway. Consider that it could even moderate overzealous law enforcement. Kind of like the cams on cop cars in the US.
"Now It Is 1984 Knock knock at your front door It's the suede denim secret police ..."
read people read!
I look forward to what will be a hugely entertaining collection of videos which I can enjoy vicariously of enraged motorists punching the wardens when they get ticketed or clamped. Please let the post the vids on youtube.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I understand the reason why this story is on the front page, and I understand that the reader might have concerns about the privacy implications. That doesn't mean that a "news story" should contain such forcing language:
The Surveillance Society of Great Britain has taken another turn for the worse
This sentence imposes the view that this move is obviously bad, when in fact, although I really hate privacy breaches and measures that remove privacy, I like this idea. It gives some legal weight to these fines, and will hopefully do their part to stop people littering mindlessly. While anti-social behaviour is a bit ambiguous in terminology, I'm sure that if you are given a fine with evidence on camera, then the reason can't be that frivilous.
Behaviour such as graffiti writing and dis-orderly conduct are considered anti-social behaviour, and its perpetrators won't have as easy a time with deniability, plausible or otherwise, when the pictures/video comes into play. Also the guy who always maintains that there was money in the meter will have a hard time of it. This tech sorely needed states-side...but won't happen for fear of invasion of privacy issues.
For every present, there is a past
Is it legal for you to wear a camera to monitor the police? I'd consider that a civil duty.
Quite apart from that, can the police be tracked by the signal from the head mounted camera and radio? Why yes, they can be. The more RF-emanating equipment the police carry, the easier it becomes to track them, know when they're coming, and evade them. RF profiling ain't that hard. Catch the litterbug, but miss the bank heist. Silly LEOs.
I work for the US Government so I know all about peace love and understanding
We came,we saw, we kicked it's ass!
All nice and orwellian; but actually these camera's are watching the traffic wardens. So instead of just quietly slipping into civy street wear, and drinking the afternoon away in the pub they are now part of the city wide CCTV network. No more quickly at the struck of five just ticketing the whole street outside the pub and getting your quota.
And then there is the boss screaming on the walkie-talkie -- robbers, robbers, i want visuals, get a moveable camera^H^H^H^H^H warden to stand in the middle of traffic at Charring Cross...
Takes the fun right out a job that does.
great opportunities to abuse it.. stm )
One council was forced to apologise for its 'litter wardens' lately after they fined a woman £80 for her son dropping *two* crisps onto the pavement - despite the mother picking the packet up.
( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/sussex/6665641
Cameras on heads is a daft idea which will similarly be abused by an already overbearing, orwellian government.
This isn't so bad -- as long as the video footage is produced promptly in court when you invariably appeal the fine. In fact, for fines imposed by these walking cameras, if the government can't produce video of the offense, the case should be dropped instantly.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Lets see, if they imbed the camera in the old bobbies hat, elongated the roughly concial shape of the bobbies hat to stand approximately 6ft tall put wheels on it and add an electrified trucheon out the front, dont we end up with dalek V1.0?
Will this mean there will be less goths and emos on the streets? :)
Giuliani didn't do shit.
... oh wait, I forgot - we're talking about Giuliani here.
An improving economy (remember Clinton? government surplusses? jobs? reasonable oil prices? etcetera?) coincided with Giuliani's years in office and, like improved economies always do, led to lower crime.
But Giuliani is a master at taking credit for stuff he didn't do (some of us have long memories and remember his crap even way back when when he was in the Manhattan District Attorneys office).
Maybe he should forget about the presidency and go back to repeatedly charging $12,000 a pop giving speeches telling people the lessons learned and what to do if you are a local official faced with a public crisis like 9-11.
You would think a public servant would offer such advice for free, but
Caining, more caining needed. It's brutal, but effective. You want results, right? Well, extreme goals call for extreme messures. I just wish we had this form of punishment in the US for voilent offenders.
Read about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore
Life is not for the lazy.
Plato said that all democracies become authoritarian states through the fear of their people. Is that what we're seeing here? He also suggested that wealthy oligarchs would secretly control government, and buy huge blocks of votes when they needed power. This makes it easier for me to accept that 99% of the people out there passively accept this state of increasing surveillance and government power. We're more afraid of each other than of our governments, and so into total authoritarian dominion we go!
Anti-Globalism
Since the police are now accountable for what they do, I see this working in favor of the citizens; also, this encourages the people to clean up after themselves. Where I live, the volunteers who clean the freeway (Hwy 99) have decided to send a message to Californians by leaving a huge pile of trash on one of the freeway exits (It has been there for over 2 months now, and could remain for a few more) The British will not have to resort to such tactics, due to the strict enforcement. I could not see this as a privacy violation, as it is no more invasive than the cameras mounted on CHP cars. The video feed would be almost identical to the videos recorded by security cameras, which very few people seem to object to.
"I see your scandal, and raise you a CONSPIRACY!!!"
I'm not shouting Orwellian until these cameras are used to persecute people within their private homes or businesses. At this point its the government policing their own god-damned streets, which I can care less about. What was scary about 1984 and the like was the fact that rebellion became impossible with this unstoppable grid of control. Fortunately, we can still write in our homes and mail. Oh wait, the government can read our mail. Well, we can e-mai...no...uhm...pho...no...but its not like they can persecute us by labelling us some ridiculous, frivolous and nearly impossible to define...oh wait...damn there good...
You know, we can still create smoke signals in reverse binary portgeuse translated backwards in babel fish from French.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
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.
I don't like the cameras set up to observe the public, for obvious reasons. Even if they are initially used for benign reasons it provides a tool that can be easily exploited by a police state. On the other hand, if a police officer is already observing a crime or in the process of apprehending a suspect the camera is a valuable tool. It provides evidence in court that's difficult to refute and reduces the potential for police abuse because their actions are obviously being observed.
Concerns about police states aside there's a real and serious problem with crime in the United States, and presumably the UK given what I've read and heard. One of the biggest problems I see in the city where I live is that the authorities always react, they never prevent anything. They're always showing up after something has happened. Obviously, they can't predict crime, but there are steps that can be taken to reduce the chances of crimes being committed.
The biggest problem I see is with the lack of police presence. It's not that my city has an under-staffed police department. It's that whenever I do see a police officer he's speeding past. I can't count the times I've seen an excessive number of police flock to a relatively minor incident. Then there are times where a police officer will decide they no longer feel like waiting at a traffic light and just blow through it. But like I said, these are the few times I actually see them.
So what happens? I have no direct contact with these officers. And the only time I do my impression isn't always a favorable one. And I'm a law-abiding citizen who tends to be sympathetic with the sort of problems the police have to contend with. Now, compound that problem with the inner city mentality of us-versus-them. There's this attitude that the cops are out to get them. The culture perpetuates this idea, so you've got children being indoctrinated, indirectly, with the idea that the police is the enemy. Growing up I've known kids with exactly this sort of attitude.
So ultimately, what I think would go a long way to help reduce crime would be to have police officers patrolling on foot, perhaps in pairs and with a patrol car nearby to respond to emergencies. This has a few advantages. First, these officers linger in neighborhoods longer because they're walking. People are less apt to commit a crime with a police officer standing by. Secondly, because they're out in public they're a lot more likely to interact with citizens. This builds understanding and sympathy. Police officers are less likely to be arrogant and citizens will respond more favorably. As things stand right now the interaction between officers and citizens is too impersonal.
It tends to bother me when people automatically lash out at something intended to fight crime because of fears of freedoms being trampled. Apparently it's not a problem when criminals and troublemakers are trampling on people's freedoms. When I was working in Asia I could walk around at 3am without much concern. There's no way in hell I'd venture to do that in most American cities. I've had a gun pulled on me on the way home from the train station in the States. And this is in addition to the general bad attitude, disregard for public and private property I see day in and day out.
Think about it. Who really has to be concerned about these head cameras? I'd say the criminal element, because if you're going about your business doing nothing wrong then what do you have to worry about? I think there's a misplaced sense of priorities when people are more outraged about some cameras than they are by how much crime there is out there.
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.
In my experience, cops in the UK are much less aggressive than those in the US (which also translates as not as good as actually dealing with criminals) and less inclined to actually abuse authority.
While we have more CCTV cameras than any other country, this means that even criminals caught on film go about unhindered. The cops are too lazy to look at the footage and follow up the crime, even if you try and press charges (whether it's footage you hand them from your business CCTV, public footage on a street CCTV cam or footage from a private CCTV cam - e.g. run by the local estate in the case of a privately managed housing complex).
In the defense of the police, even if they do catch them, they know (as do we) that it's a waste of time as they will be right back on the streets - we don't have any room in our jails (see the recent debacle about moving to 'prison ships' as an emergency measure to increase capacity) and so the judges - who are complicit in following 'goverment recommendations' that suggest not putting people in jail - will turn them free with some 40 hours community service at best.
So, we have one of the highest prision populations in Europe with the most street surveillance, but our streets are still full of hooligans and the police are unwilling to go after anything that isn't a glamerous / high profile crime (like arresting drug dealers, murderers, etc). The big problem we have is that successive governments seem to think installing CCTV cameras helps, which it manifestly doesn't.
I actually like the vagaries of our legal system, in that they are generally applied sensibly. European legislation also helps counter-act it by protecting the rights in the individual in a number of ways.
I agree with you on the 'moving to Canada' idea. As a less drastic option, maybe now the SNP (Scottish National Party) are in charge in Scotland (barely) and are keen to establish independence I can move up north (assuming they spend money on more sensible things, which they claim to be keen to do).
The police actions are not being recored from the point of view of the policed.
Now, if everyone else wore a camera on their head and recorded the police, *then* the police action would be recorded. Given how many times I have seen footage of police putting their hands over TV camera lenses in order to stop the filming of what ever the police were doing, I somehow don't think the idea of all of us pointing our cameras at *them* would be popular.
The first time a camera-wearing officer tries to stop a citizen from filming the officer, *then* we will see what this is all about.
Then all we need to counter their over-zealous activity is another kind of robot to push them down the stairs.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
American police are definitely VERY aggressive. Check out this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOgsJU2d45Y
It shows at least 10 police setting up a sting operation to bust people for minor amounts of marijuana. The video shows the police arresting someone for attempting to purchase $10 of pot. When confronted by the police most of the people stop and put their hands up. The police then proceed to tackle from a full speed run. The people are pinned down and arrested. Now this is someone i want to see police do to violent criminals. Confront them, tackle them if they flee, book them and prosecute them. But what is this all about? Now i don't want to bring up the legality of marijuana other than this video is of very minor criminals who are having LOTS of police money spent in chasing them.
Police are supposed to enforce ALL laws regardless of their personal feelings and that is fine. This however is a waste of money. I don't want to dwell on one video too much because this aggressive attitude is all over. Tons of money is being spent in America setting up CCTV systems for police. Traffic lights are getting cameras put in place to enforce minor traffic laws. I realize there is a safety issue but that is really not what is at stake here. The police enforce more crimes that make them money (traffic tickets, drug charges where they can seize cash and property) and they spend less time on the safety of society as a whole. The police are underfunded and overstressed which leads to some meathead cops blowing off steam by roughing up marijuana users. The whole thing is very sad for the police and the criminals but the ones who really lose out are the normal members of society.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
It shows at least 10 police setting up a sting operation to bust people for minor amounts of marijuana. The video shows the police arresting someone for attempting to purchase $10 of pot.
In the UK, the huge crowd of cops involved would probably get fired for that.
I can only laugh that the Brittish people are paying for this.
I suspect they will only be willing to pay for this for a very limited time.
I give this whole experiment at most 10 years before they start tearing it down under the flag of "scaling it back and reducing costs," at which point another period will pass and they'll scrap the whole thing.
The big problem we have is that successive governments seem to think installing CCTV cameras helps, which it manifestly doesn't.
... and if you want to know why it doesn't, and also why I'm not too worried about CCTV and people shouting "Orwell! Panopticon!" then read this blog entry by a UK traffic warden. It pretty much sums up my experience of trying to use CCTV footage to identify whoever vandalised my car in a private car park.
No they can't: in England only a court may impose a fine, anything else is just a Penatly Charge Notice with an intent to prosecute if you refuse to pay.
The 1689 Bill of Rights says that Englishmen have freedom from fines and forfeitures without trial.
If you aren't far left by the age of 18 you have no heart. If you aren't far right by 30 you have no brain.
...the ones who really lose out are the normal members of society.
But the big winner is the prison industry, for which these laws were designed to benefit. The law isn't about justice. It's about generating revenue. The only relation it has to society is its ability to squeeze more money out of that society. So, in some places you will spend more time in prison for drug law violations while they tell you that they are too full to incarcerate somebody for assault on a child!
What?
I don't doubt it, know your enemy and all that !
The US model was rooted in a very different society. In the UK, the lawyers are behaving like US lawyers, challenging everything, while in general the magistrates and the judges have been more tolerant than they would be in the US. This has caused low level criminals to believe that they can always get off, and leads to the need to have several police involved in even the most minor cases because lawyers will challenge the evidence of a single policeman. In the past they would not, and, while this led to the occasional miscarriage of justice, it did mean that the integrity of the police was very important because bad evidence by one would taint all police.
The headcams are basically a way of circumventing challenges from bad lawyers. As such they are not evidence of a surveillance society, they are evidence of a society where the justice system has been tilted too far in favour of criminals.
Pining for the fjords
I was in Birmingham UK yesterday and saw a street warden with a head mounted camera. So this is already happening. Additionally, many police jurisdictions in the US already use similar technology like a camera with a wide angle lens attached to their vest.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
You're obviously not a Southerner - where do you think the convicts nicked it from? ;P
The difference is that UK law encompasses an aspect of reasonableness.
Generally, if you're reasonable, the plod will be reasonable. If you're unreasonable though, they can throw the book at you.
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.
Disclaimers:
/. or somewhere else regarding the rapidly increasing (both technologically and numerically) public places surveillance network... the "irk" was with the so-called "privacy concerns".
* this is not necessarily directed at the OP
* I don't live in the US, I don't live in the UK
* this is not a political comment
Now, this one bit always irked me badly whenever I would see something on
HOW THE HELL does one manage to get "PUBLIC places surveillance" and "PRIVACY concerns" in the same sentence, refering to the same issue, without literally imploding from sheer vacuum in their cranial cavity ?
It's a PUBLIC place, forgodssake, you are NOT EXPECTED to get ANY KIND OF PRIVACY in a freaking public place, dammit !
Moreso, it would be advisable to have absolutely ZERO privacy in ANY public place, and that for each and every individual in a public place.
Want privacy, go home, or rent a room, or sit in a cabin, or any other PRIVATE place, where you CAN have your privacy.
Now, would they be talking about surveillance cameras/microphones in your home, or blanket wiretaps on your phones, or any other intrusion in your privacy, well, THAT would be too much. Or, maybe if they were talking about cameras that can see through your clothes (as if, but you never know), or about powerful directional microphones capable of catching up a whisper, or about cameras with high enough definition and FPS so that they could lip-read from you... THAT would also be borderline invasive (even in public, you can create a semblance of privacy by, say, sitting at a table at a cafe, for instance).
Newsflash, UK ain't worse off with regards to privacy concerns.
Oh, well, sorry for the yelling, and in the end, it did get somewhat political, but still, the core argument remains.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PRIVACY IN PUBLIC, PERIOD
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
Like what? I can't afford the level of bribe that big companies can, so I have no involvement in democracy as it is practiced in the UK. 30 years of Thatcherism has really taken its toll on the concept of democratic choice here. If there's nothing in it for multi-nationals it simply doesn't happen anymore.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
"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."
:/
I was thinking of doing this and encouraging others to do so, but at £10 a go it soon gets pricey
So I have no right to privacy in my garden while sunbathing? I have a large fence that blocks the view from 99% of the people, but these cameras are up on 40 foot poles. They see all. it's one thing having your neighbor squinting to see what you are doing, but having the police watch you in your garden is a different matter. Not only that, but they can pan and zoom into the windows of houses. I am not saying that they do though!
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
From their site:
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
In previous threads on /. regarding CCTV coverage of public space(s) in Britain, there have been observational comments (here's one http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=229567&cid=186 18653) about street level nuisance behaviour - broken windows, drunks hassling people, etc. I don't live in Britain, so I have no experience of my own to comment on WRT this topic.
However, in my world of values, proceeding through one's normal daily activities without an expectation of surveillance is one of the hallmarks of a free society. Removing or impinging upon this characteristic is a direct step in the direction of what I call a police state.
The output of this surveillance will inevitably be used for purposes beyond the original stated intent. People will keep coming back to that well until they get what they want in some relative circumstance. You may shut them down once, twice or one hundred times, but they will prevail.
If indeed a culture of hooliganism (or whatever you want to call it) is growing in the U.K., then the reasons behind this trend need to be examined and addressed.
I know this sounds idealistic and not particularly practical to those who are living the problem, but this is Big Shit that will define your culture in the mid- to long-term. So if this burns karma on me, so be it.
BTW, I'm a Canadian social democrat, not a /. libertarian. Believing in collective social values does not map onto embracing a culture and government that enages in daily surveillance of Joe and Joan Citizen.
On a pessimistic day, it seems to me that we've already lost the war for privacy on a global level. But fuck it, I'm not giving up on fighting against cameras in my town's downtown core. Our local downtown business association has been lobbying to install just such a system for three or four years now, offering to pay the upfront capital cost if the municipality takes on the maintenance and upkeep. Every time it comes up, I write to and phone my city council representative, and write the downtown biz association telling them I fall right in their target demographic and have too much disposable income for my own good, and that their membership will never see another penny of my money if they push this initiative. The chickenshits have *never* responded.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
At least one of you bothered to come to Europe and learn something about the world. You are to be congratulated.
1 - there are different types of prison, and in different areas. Prisons in Wales being full does not mean that prisons in Manchester are full, or vice versa. Equally, prisons for serious offenders being full does not mean prisons for minor offenders (which I suspect the private sector finds easier and cheaper to run) will be full.
2 - the article you linked to does not mention an assault on a child by the defendent, it refers to possession of images of an assault on a child. This is defined in UK law as a crime in itself, but is still not the same as an actual assault on a child.
3 - If you're looking for someone committing an actual assault on someone under the age of 16 being bailed, you probably want this article.
So they're the equivalent of a "meter maid" (or parking enforcement dude, if you want to be P.C.) in US cities?
A camera remembers clearly. A camera can't be bribed, tricked, or forced to say something other than what it saw. A camera isn't prejudiced against blacks, gays, Muslims, and women. A camera doesn't get tired or have a bad day or a fight with its spouse or a hangover.
I have no problems with cameras all over the place, but then, I don't do things I'm not supposed to.
I piss off bigots.
Sure the authorities may not abuse this power now but what's to stop them from abusing it in the future?
During the 1930 US Census added a seemingly harmless addition to the census form: nationality. This meaningless piece of data was used 20-odd years later for the collection of German and Japanese immigrants into concentration camps.
I went through a political crisis about a decade back, the result of which was that I became a Libertarian, because they had a no-holds-barred personal freedoms platform and a don't-strike-first foreign policy platform. But it has become apparent to me that the everything-should-be-private portion of Libertarianism outweighs the positive aspects.
There are several facets of human endeavor that cannot function effectively as businesses because their primary function is not the generation of profit. But we call these "industries", nonetheless.
None of those listed above are properly industries - each is intended primarily to produce the noun listed before the word "industry", not profits. Additionally, those are some of the key measures of a civilization - how healthy, well educated, and secure are you? How do you treat those who break society's rules?
My current political crisis started a couple of years ago, and I'm still adrift.
Now i don't want to bring up the legality of marijuana
Why not? Why is any money spent on marijuana enforcement? Couldn't those ten cops with the sting operation have been out patrolling somewhere?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Actually, when the issue of cops abusing power in the US came up, my suggestion was that they should have some form of continuous camera (though I had thought more of on on-belt).
That way, if somebody alleges police violence, you can show footage. If something happened, it will be there. If the cop turned off the camera, then it will become apparent pretty quickly that there was a likely ulterior motive in doing so. Part of procedure should be to flip on the cam upon exiting the police vehicle, so no turning it on after the action is over, either.
The footage wouldn't have to be used all the time, but surveillance might make people think twice about taking a swing at the cops, and likewise for cops who like to abuse power.
Oh, we go out into the world quite often. Our F16 & F22's allow us spectacular views during laser targeted bombimg runs.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.