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.
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.
Moreover, I like the idea of police actions being recorded at all times. It (conceivably) increases accountability for the officers. This is not at all like posting cameras at fixed locations with loudspeakers, which offers no accountability for officers and plenty of opportunity for abuse.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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.
I like this much better than the entire CCTV surveillance. The camera just sees what the officer sees. So no blatant invasion of privacy as we see with the CCTV system.
Now if only they removed CCTV and use the cameras like this on every officer we should probably have less misconducts and brutality.
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.
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? :)
With regard to "only filiming what the officer can SEE", the cameras will indeed film everything that the officer can see, and also what the officer does not see. Do you register every car's license plate in your memory as the cars go by? I don't, but the camera does. Does the officer recognize every unfamiliar face? No; but a camera, combined with a complete face database, will. The addition of cameras creates an ability that the officers did not have before. I would compare it to giving officers an X-ray eyesight, where they could see through clothes - presumably to search for weapons. This helps in creating the class of enforcers who are legally and physically stronger than you, who are better organized and supported, who see more and know more... and who would be you to them? Anything but an equal citizen; a lowly plebeian, to be abused in any way. Police are already top dogs, unaccountable and unreachable and always right; the society does not need to elevate them any further.
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
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.
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).
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
...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?
You're obviously not a Southerner - where do you think the convicts nicked it from? ;P
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.
Not just that. They're also talking about using them to have these wardens issue fines for miscellaneous antisocial behaviour, such as littering. I don't know the situation in the locality here, but in many places these days, parking enforcement is done by target-driven, commercially-employed civilians, not police officers or similar officials. It's bad enough giving police officers the power to level on-the-spot fines, but giving it to other civilians is just a recipe for disaster.
For the record, I don't park illegally, and have never received a ticket. However, it's not hard to see why people feel aggrieved, when many local councils are (a) deliberately reducing parking opportunities and dramatically increasing the associated charges, in a fairly transparent move to penalise car drivers, and (b) using target-driven enforcement that allows no discretion to the warden (though to be fair, you usually can appeal afterwards if you'd rather waste several hours of your life than pay a small fine). Just remember, the next time your car breaks down and you pull it over to the side of the road to minimise the disruption to others before it can be reparied/towed, that there is no exemption in law for this, and you can be penalised for something you have no control over.
It's a bit like car tax: the government is very proud of its database (as its adverts keep telling us) and smart enough to find people to send them penalty notices if someone forgets to pay, yet somehow they can't reliably distribute the reminders (which are also necessary to pay in the most convenient ways, though apparently you can get an alternative form from a Post Office if you dig out four different bits of paperwork and take them all along in person). Although you can pay on-line, it takes about five days to get you a tax disc, and driving without displaying one (even if you've properly paid the tax) is an offence in its own right that can carry a 1k fine. Oh, and while they can have an entire on-line system for payment, and a robust database that has everyone's contact details, it seems to be beyond them to send an e-mail reminder a couple of days before the deadline to those who "forgot" (or just didn't get the reminder letter). Presumably this would save many drivers the embarrassment of being criminalised, but it would also cost the government all those lovely fines.
Such a culture inevitably breeds contempt for the law and those who enforce it, and it's the same with parking fines. Sure, ticket the antisocial gits who think their need to get takeaway pizza is more important than anyone else's need to get down a busy road in the rush hour, but someone who gets back to a pay-and-display car park five minutes late on a properly bought three-hour ticket shouldn't be treated as a criminal. Everyone makes mistakes, and laws that penalise everyone are broken.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.