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10,000 Cameras Ineffective At Deterring Crime
Mike writes "London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million but an analysis of the publicly funded spy network has cast serious doubt on its ability to help solve crime. In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average. The study found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any. Could this be an effective argument against the proliferation of cameras or will politicians simply ignore the facts and press ahead?"
Politicians will simply ignore the facts and press ahead.
"Could this be an effective argument against the proliferation of cameras or will politicians simply ignore the facts and press ahead?"
Was that a rhetoric question?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"They must have some crappy cops"
is the first comment by RandomVisitor on the story at Bruce Schneier's blog. It's really quite true; we can't judge based on these statistics whether it's working or not.
"....will politicians simply ignore the facts and press ahead?" Yes they will
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
A drop in crime is evidence that the cameras work.
An increase in crime is evidence that more cameras are necessary.
Once you start arguing effectiveness then all it takes is a new study to show that it's still promising technology and that it just needs to be continued/improved/advanced/made more comprehensive/etc.
Dont fall into the trap of arguing the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of something that we already know has nothing to do with crime.
I recall a reporter visiting one of these "control rooms" where all the camera feeds are fed to. She recalls seeing a number of men/boys zooming in on cute girls to pass the otherwise boring time.
Not surprising... these things are pointless.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
In the summary there isn't really any evidence that this stuff isn't working, especially when the only statistic is this one:
In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average
Wouldn't the areas with higher crime-rates have more cameras in the first place? The real question that should be asked is whether or not the crime rate has gone down in those areas. Now, I'll admit that I've only read the summary, but it should be safe to assume that the summary will contain the most important statistics, meaning that it is also safe to assume that the article is full of more statistics just like that one.
When you gather that much footage, what do you look at? Unless the brits are ready hire a veritable army of people to scan through the video, they'll have to pick and choose what's important enough to look for. The 7/7 bombings were, daily muggings aren't.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The study (or at least what was published in this article) says nothing about the rate of crimes solved before the cameras. The study doesn't talk about other issues like police force funding Nothing about the demographics of each borough. So while it may be true that cameras don't stop crime or help to solve it, there is nothing in this article to support that assertion.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The study found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.
on another hand, if I want to do crime, I wouldn't want to do it in place that has hundreds of cameras.
If the cameras help reducing crime rate, then they work.
"Could this be an effective argument against the proliferation of cameras or will politicians simply ignore the facts and press ahead?"
hm...
Well, like Archie Bunker said: "Stop confusing me with facts!"
Come on people: don't you see this is for your protection against Terrorists?
Also, please think of the children!
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
why am i not surprised...
- js.
The point of these cameras is not to make people safer, but to make people *feel* safer. Last I heard, the Brits love the things ...
How does it become fact prior to their discovery it's a failure? It was an attempt not a certainty. You are implying that you knew it was going to not work prior to this revelation and now your right. Well the universe doesn't work like that.
Had it worked then the 200 million pounds paid out would have been well spent. Perhaps there are ways to make it work however I must admit I doubt it. You may be able to track back though the logged video and the time and place of an event and what happened prior & afterward. However you might end up getting the time wrong and following the wrong person from camera to camera.
Well that's life.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
The cameras are not there to catch criminals, but to deter them. Those who would otherwise be committing crimes in full catchable view of the cameras are no longer doing so.
Don't get me wrong, I like my privacy as much as the next /.er but accuracy is important.
Tomorrow, I may eat another house plant
"on another hand, if I want to do crime, I wouldn't want to do it in place that has hundreds of cameras."
Coming to a P2P user near you.
Because they are stupid - or they would not be politicians. Just look at the ongoing mess they create!
Don't confuse the politicians with facts, they have demagoguery to accomplish.
Seriously, when did "facts" actually figure into politics. Everything is emotion. "Its for the children", "War on _______", "help the homeless" etc are all emotional stimuli.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You can't make a judgement on the effectiveness of the cameras without asking more questions. The Liberal Democrats are just peddling their usual head in the clouds crap about a "repressed" Britain so they look like they're the sole defenders of "freedom". However you look at it, without more science this is just self-serving politics. These guys need to grow up and stop being assholes, and Slashdot needs to start asking what the truth really is instead of fapping itself on something that just fits with its own knee-jerk prejudices.
There's times when I can really appreciate how some "dictatorships" get in a real piss with America and human rights organisations poking their nose in. Britain has really serious problems with corporate asset strippers and social breakdown, and if cameras are part of the mix to instill a more discipline and social sensitivity in people then there's nothing wrong with that. As with taking down the military guard towers in Northern Ireland, when the threat recedes it's likely they'll be removed. It's something called proportion. Look it up.
A drop in crime is evidence that the cameras work. An increase in crime is evidence that more cameras are necessary.
You forgot one: "unchanging crime levels mean the cameras kept crime from getting worse, and removing them would mean an explosion of crime." It'd be like firing cops; no politician who wants to keep his or her office would dare do it, even if it a sound decision. The slightest crime, and victims will blame the official, and the press will be more than happy to stick the microphone in front of their face while they do it.
The MBTA (which shockingly reversed its decades-old policy of prohibiting cameras on MBTA property) had been going nuts installing "high resolution digital cameras" around the system. Not anywhere on the platforms, mind you- but at the fare gates.
They blew a lot of smoke to the two competing pulp-journalism freebies (Metro and "Boston Now", which litter the system) about how great the cameras were, how they'd catch anyone jumping fares, etc. Grabauskas bragged about the "high resolution" cameras, and both rags printed images of a guy kicking a gate in (yep. They're that weak- a decent kick will take them out of commission.) The photo was embarassingly bad- you could barely tell it was a guy, and barely ID what he was wearing. The image was low-resolution, blurry, over-compressed, and full of noise.
Oh, and they didn't seem to help when two kids shot up another kid on the Orange line (the MBTA police's response was to transfer the entire trainload of passengers onto busses and hold them for pat-down searches. This was despite witnesses repeatedly stating that the two shooters immediately fled the scene and left the station. They still haven't been found, months later.)
Also, if you're in North Station on the platform for outbound, take a look at the couple of cameras situated at the end of the platform closest to the "Garden". You'll note one is a FLIR camera, pointed into the tunnel. What the hell for?
North Station is also where the MBTA police regularly conduct forced "screenings", usually during rush-hour. For those who don't know: North Station is where people transfer from the orange/green lines to the commuter lines to get home. The MBTA police, like complete idiots, park their vehicles up in front of the station (which is a giant "hey, there's a "random search" thing going on here!" sign), and then stop people trying to get home (where missing a train can mean you don't get home for another 1-2 hours or more.)
Please help metamoderate.
Exactly. The only people who have anything to worry about from the cameras are the "law abiding" people who do not support the current government and are willing to be seen protesting.
10,000 cameras is a whole lot of boring dead air on film in order to find one case of someone committing a crime. Chances are, too, most people know where the cameras are, and are careful to do things out of clear sight. It takes a whole lot of people a lot of time to go through that much tape and not miss anything. I'd have thought most folks would have learned all that by now.
Given the assumption that not all cops are bad, and going further saying that most cops are good, the solution to the crime problem is to get police back on foot in communities.
You can only stop so much crime blowing through an arterial road at 45mph. But regularly patrolling an area on foot, a good cop will notice that "Mrs. Allison's car is gone, and the front door is wide open" prompting a closer look.
Also, foot patrol (or bicycle, rollerblade, whatever) cops aren't generally tied up with traffic stops and other non-criminal events. They are free to stop the little crimes (graffiti, vandalism, burglary) that scare off the 'good' folks allowing seedier elements to take over an area.
But, cops on foot are expensive. And you need a lot of them to be effective. And since they're going after criminals, they're not making the city any money in the form of tickets and fines.
There are some jobs best done by real humans on location. Maybe your board meeting with the Beijing office can be done via teleconference, but protecting residents and preventing crime cannot.
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1 CCTV camera solves 100% of the crimes it records The article argues,the money could be better spent on more police. Do you think the police would even investigate the pickpocket crime the article depicts had it not been on video? Why are they using CCTV? Kind of expensive. How about crapload of folding@home cameras. Imagine a beowulf cluster of them! p.s. in the U.S. you could make a law that requires police to carry cameras instead of tasers. There. Now I've done it.
I work for a defence contractor who makes lots of money from items like this. In the states, Raytheon made red-light cameras and made a bundle (but eventually had to sell the business). There is a lot of money spent on non-useful tech like this and money not well spent on programs that actually need it. So long as the money is available (like some of the DHS funds), it will be spent.
Was there crime before the invention of the phone? Before the invention of the computer? Before the invention of the video camera? How were crimes solved 10, 20, or 50 years ago? Technology aids in solving crimes but it is not the solution, even if we become a surveillance society.
10,000 Cameras Ineffective At Deterring Crime
... that criminals are incapable of changing their tactics/habits, and that having cameras simply makes it impossible for them to work. That's just not true: criminals will adapt to changing circumstances and will find new ways to achieve their nefarious ends. Cameras merely change the face of crime, they don't eliminate it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I'd like to know if crime rates have gone up due to the cameras being stolen!
I wonder how much of this has to do with the misconception that somebody can use Photoshop to extract a high resolution image from a crappy CCD cam.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Or could the cameras simply suck? I remember the London subway bombings and the pictures they released of the men who blew themselves up. Didn't the pictures look like they were taken with a teenager's private web cam? Maybe they should opt for one 1,000 high-def cameras instead then.
Full Tilt
Anyone who thinks the cameras have anything to do with deterring crime are fooling themselves. They're meant as a means to control the populace and nothing more.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Politicians will simply ignore the facts and press ahead.
Many around here misrepresent and ignore facts as well. That and they have emotional poorly thought out reactions that are rooted more in their politics than it logic. Note the statement:
"The study found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any."
If you apply a modest amount of logic it might occur to you that everything seems to be described in terms of percentages. The fact the percentages may be similar does not mean cameras are ineffective. What is the volume of crime? The absence of such info should make an unbiased reader quite suspicious. Also what were the volumes before the cameras? One of the stated goals of the camera systems is that they would be a deterrent. The volume of crime could be a fraction of pre-camera days and the percentage of solved crimes could be the same.
If you search BBC for CCTV, what you find is nothing favorable. Law enforcement figures consistently say the money would be better spent on normal police work. Studdies never show a real decrease in crime. Demographics don't matter because the cameras are everywhere.
The only reasonable conclusion is that the cameras are not really about crime.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Since when was this about facts?
The cameras are in place as a deterrent to criminals. They are not primarily in place to affect the solving of crimes. If someone is determined to perform a criminal act then no deterrent will work. This is evident just by examining the ratio of crime verses penalties throughout history.
Would you look through 10,000 videos to find the guy that stole a car between 10PM and 6am on friday/saturday? Just because we can collect a stupid amount of data doesn't mean it's entirely useful.
yvan eht nioj
That London has basically a Communist mayor (but Labour in name) and the self-proclaimed center of liberalism here in San Francisco is looking to add more of these cameras. Why is it the left-wing areas leading the way here? I thought the Republicans were the enemy of my rights.
I noticed one glaring omission from the statistics listed in the article: what was the rate of unsolved crimes before the cameras were installed? That information would seem to be a requirement for any study concerning the effectiveness of the cameras.
there are some bad ghetto neighborhoods in big US cities even the cops don't dare go in to...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
You only quoted part of the statement:
In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average. The study found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.
I agree with you that the first sentence is meaningless in assessing the effectiveness of the cameras but the second is not. The cameras are supposed to deter crime by making it easier to catch the criminals. If the latter is not the case then they will not act as a deterent. Of course to know this you would want to understand a lot more: does the amount of crime mke it harder to catch the criminals? Is this statistic based on the fraction or absolute rate of crimes solved? etc.
Now, I'll admit that I've only read the summary, but it should be safe to assume that the summary will contain the most important statistics
I agree that it should be safe to assume this but given that the writer of the summary has clearly demonstrated a lack of understanding of relevant statistics it is clearly not a safe assumption in this case!
Cameras are only as good as the people (numbers and training) watching them and computers can't provide a magic bullet to fill the gap? I'm speechless. Who woulda thunk it?
Maybe they do not help in deterring crime but I wonder if they help get convictions. If you catch a purse napper it's hard for him to say that he just found it in the garbage if they have him on video forcefully taking it from her.
There's very little I hate more than fucking hit-and-run drunk drivers that I've seen ended many good people's life with their irresponsibility. They are no worse than murderers, IMO. Here in Singapore, we have quite a few hit-and-run incidents that were solved thanks to such cameras on our expressways. Loss of privacy? A very small price to pay for catching and deterring drunk drivers.
Fucking drunk drivers.
The cameras aren't for solving crime. They're a line of defense against the Great Old Ones.
No. Continue to destroy civil liberties.
Australia spent $500 million to buy guns from law abiding citizens and it has had no effect on violent crime in that country. The bikie's and other criminals still have access to illegal arms, so nothing has changed much for them. In fact, some of the guns that were confiscated during the 'buy back' were later sold to criminals instead of being destroyed.
...states that they have been *highly* effective at detecting cleavage. This may have something to do with who's manning said cameras.
Without the CCTV footage, the police wouldn't have had any leads to work with in the James Bulger case. There is this horrible case in Malaysia right now where CCTV has provided some some clues. There are plenty more cases where CCTV has helped. Maybe you have experienced yourself in your workplace. Something goes missing and you ask around and everyone shrugs their shoulders. But CCTV recording reveals very clearly who dun it!
The story summary is that the cameras do not prevent crime - well of course they do not, nothing you do with an 80% failure rate is going to have an effect on anything.
That is why the question is, why are they not effective? Does it turn out you simply can't solve crime by having cameras everywhere that see who did it? If so, remove the cameras. Is there a reasonable plan to greatly increase effectiveness? If so, implement it and make sure to set some sort of measurements to see it is working.
Myself I am skeptical the cameras can ever really help that much. But, effectiveness is key to argue to see if they should be kept or not.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This article is an incredibly juicy example of lying with facts...it is like shooting fish in a barrel, which has been drained of water :-)
I just wish I had more time to dig into it and address it in totality...
Ok, here are a few issues:
Confusing prevention and solution
The argument for CCTV is that it helps prevent and solve crimes, but the only statistics presented here concern the solution of crime. We don't have any comment on the crime rates (and the mix of crimes committed) prior to cameras or in comparing area to area.
For example, I understand that the UK, like the US, has criminalized a wide range of activities in the last few years. So we need to account for this fact.
No correlation between area and camera coverage (or population)
Nothing tells me about the number of cameras per person or per square meter. All I get is that this area has 1,500 cameras, this area 575. I have no way to compare coverage to closure rates.
No examination of demographics, closure rates, and crime rates
Even as a Yank, I know that several of the areas listed as having few cameras are as my Brit friends would put it, "Posh". What do I know about the others? Nothing, but I need to know to do a reasonable analysis.
Yours,
Jordan
In the situations that these cameras are used it is a waste of money. They do not deter criminals, they just make the public feel watched and untrusted. To think other wise is to give yourself a false sense of security.
I have a buddy that owns a local restaurant with 16 cameras installed in and outside the building. They are good to dispel employees steeling or goofing off at the wrong times but if you don't know the person before hand they are useless.
Example: my buddy rides his bicycle to work 2 or 3 time a week for exercise. He leaves it next to the dumpster between that and a 8 foot high brick enclousre.
The one day he goes out to make his ride home and find the bike missing.So he plays back the tapes (dvr or dvd back-ups) to see the time the guy steels the bike.
It was worthless because you can make out who it is other then it was a older guy.
Getting a good shot seemed to be the key, which would be hard with a unmanned camera.
I will quote the words of an antique store worker who was describing the stores aging surveillance system:
These cameras are only enough to keep an honest man honest
... the people simply ignore the facts, and politicians cash in on their fears about crime on the streets.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Did any politician ever admit they were wrong ans say "Ok, let's scrap it?"
Nope. It's always a case of "I didn't have enough funding to do it properly!"
Seriously, how hard is it to beat a camera. A hoodie, a baseball cap and sunglasses - it's not like they're high definition video...
(And no, I'm not advocating they spend another 200 million switching to hi-def - see above.
No sig today...
There are two ways to use CCTV cameras, one is simply having them there as a deterent to try and scare would be offenders, the other is to catch someone in the act and identify them. Now, the second strategy is complicated by the fact that in a public place almost all your footage is going to be out of focus. A camera has to be set to a specific focal length which can cover a specific distance from the camera and anything closer. If you set the length too far away, you get a horribly small field of view. So, given that you might have 3-4 cameras covering a block thats maybe 10,000 square feet, and perhaps 100 square feet of that is actually clear on camera, the odds of catching a crime clearly enough to identify an offender would be minimal. Therefore if their strategy is simply as a deterent, then we have one conclusion: the criminals in this area don't care if they're being watched, and you just wasted an obscene amount of money.
lesse, 10,000 cameras for £200M, That would be wholey freaking business plan, Batman, thats £20,000 per camera! This is a bigtime profit center for the people involved in it.
(either that, or the stats are somehow whacked).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
The US currently spends over $50B per year on the war on drugs. They have been "fighting" this war for over 30 years and have not even made a dent. So, every year, they spend more. If this isn't the clearest example of politicians ignoring facts then I don't know what is.
People who say "money does not buy happiness" are just people without money trying to make themselves feel better.
> Could this be an effective argument against the
> proliferation of cameras or will politicians simply
> ignore the facts and press ahead?
It has been shown by traffic engineers that American
speed limits are set too low. The rule they use is
the 85% rule - the average speed of 85% of the traffic
is the best speed. By definition, in fact, as it there-
fore guarantees that cops only have to deal with the 15%
of the population who will not drive reasonably and
prudently. This rule-of-thumb has been shown useful
again and again. Yet the US persists in restricting
speeds to 55 or 65 miles an hour. According to many
traffic engineer studies, this results in 75%(+/- a
small number, I don't recall) offenders, far more than
police can handle. Have the speed limits been raised
to recommended levels? They have not. 75% offender
rates are great for bringing in the fines. And
those tickets also mean insurance companies can raise
your rates, even though they know perfectly well a moving
violation has no effect on your probability of a
claim. So, why the obstinacy? Could it be because every
municipality in the country is trying to get photocops
installed everywhere? Do they reduce accidents? No.
But they are great for revenue - as long as you get rid
of that "punishing the transgresser" nonsense and just
assume the registered owner of the violating car is guilty.
Guilty until proven innocent is so much more efficient.
Especially when there is no amount of proof that will
satisfy a traffic court judge that anyone is innocent.
And then we have red-light cameras. Again, traffic
engineers have pointed out - many times - that
extending the yellow light to 4 seconds and making it
consistent for all traffic lights does, indeed,
make red-light intersections safer. So do we do that?
We do not. Rather, we put up a red light camera, and
then we shorten the yellows to push up the take.
And does this make intersections safer? No, in fact the
accident rate doubles, and in some instances triples,
almost all of them, predictably, rear-end collisions.
And, I hardly dare to point out, this, again, requires
eliminating "innocent until proven guilty" and making
the registered owner responsible.
Oh, sure, the registered owner can finger the real culprit
- who is most often their spouse, but hey, it's a tort law,
so it's okay to stress and strain a marriage for the sake
of that fine.
So they all ride the gravy train, and we all pay. We pay
in money for fines and insurance rate increases, we pay in
time, as if commute distances aren't already ridiculous.
We pay in aggravation, which either damages relations with
other people or which will corrode your arteries faster than
any amount of Ben and Jerry's best. And, finally, we pay
with our lives because all of this is very profitable
for the gov't, but it causes accidents, lots of them, and
people get badly hurt or killed in such accidents -
entirely preventable accidents - every day. Think of that
when you pass one of those crosses set up by the side of the
road, and remember that money was more important to the gov't
than the life of that person, someone's son, daughter, spouse,
sibling, friend. The $$$ are more important.
So will we wind up in George Orwell's nightmare here? With
the current mania for gov't spying on Americans I'd say it's
all but guaranteed. But if there is a way to use the system
to catch jaywalkers, parking violations, right-of-way rules,
inattentive wandering between lanes while sipping one's latte,
well, you can bet we'll see those cameras - everywhere.
Freedom. Liberty. Rights. None of these can stand up to
paranoia or the almighty dollar.
Some thoughts about this:
More cameras != less crime. Seriously, does anybody think that by having cameras will prevent crime?
Too much information is difficult to go through. Since there are so many cameras, with so many feeds... That's a lot of video! I'd hate to be one of the guys (or gals) who has to go through it all.
Cameras can help identify people/vehicles/buildings/etc. After the fact, if you needed to know the license plate on a car, or the color of someone's hair... what better way than to check the camera feed? How long was the guy standing there? The camera never blinks.
I'm not against cameras in public places. I'm more against the waste of money. Want to put a camera somewhere? Then put it somewhere important like a Bank or a Police station... Not the park or every street corner.
--Pathway
Maybe they do not help in deterring crime but I wonder if they help get convictions
TFA says four paragraphs down "In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average. " If they aren't solving crimes then they aren't getting convictions either.
FalconShould there be a Law?
... their are other purposes of CCTV's, such as to use for increased behavioral analysis to use this data to identify peoples intentions and potential for criminality. To learn more about how human's behave in groups, etc.
They have many more uses then simply catching criminals or reducing crime. There is also the "Zerging" effect, where there are too many people vs. not enough law enforcement, you can't exactly have a good system until you learn how to use it. I imagine it's still in the "growing pains" phase.
While it is "not working" now, that doesn't mean it won't get better with time. I believe it is only a matter of time before things start getting really good.
Right now CCTV's are not much more then measuring devices that help scientists decode human behavior.
That's because the Hot Fuzz weren't on the job.
Seriously though, I think there are a lot of people who don't give a shit if anyone sees them committing a crime or misdemeanor. So a camera doesn't do anything for people who have no fear.
Some other folks have made references to gun stats, which reminds me quite a bit about this article. Most stories involving guns come at it from one angle or another, trying to make some point. Usually the press offers up the dangers of not enough gun control. The response to this is a listing of the dangers of gun control by groups like the NRA. What we rarely get is a substantial break down of the real effects of weapons in our society. What happened to the city that instituted strong gun control measures? Did the murder rate drop as control advocates suggest? Did other types of crime rise as gun rights advocates suggest? How about what happens when gun controls are relaxed, like instituting concealed carry laws?
When Florida liberalized gun laws, making it easier to conceal carry, homicides went down:
"In 1987, when Florida enacted such legislation, critics warned that the 'Sunshine State' would become the 'Gunshine State.' Contrary to their predictions, homicide rates dropped faster than the national average. Further, through 1997, only one permit holder out of the over 350,000 permits issued, was convicted of homicide. (Source: Kleck, Gary Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, p 370. Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York, 1997.) If the rest of the country behaved as Florida's permit holders did, the U.S. would have the lowest homicide rate in the world."
FalconShould there be a Law?
This study (such as it is) focuses merely on the ability of cameras to aid in solving crimes that actually occur. Isn't the purpose of these cameras REALLY to prevent crimes from actually occurring? Wouldn't it make sense for these areas to have more trouble solving crimes because they are preventing the more basic (and more easily solved) street crimes in the first place?
I'm not making a judgment about the morality of using these cameras in the first place, but I do think the study leaves a lot to be desired.
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
Could this be an effective argument against the proliferation of cameras or will politicians simply ignore the facts and press ahead?"
You're making the assumption that these cameras are being installed in order to be an effective deterrent to crime. Instead, they rather are real-world FUD, making citizens believe that they live in a dangerous society, justifying taking away civil liberties, and giving politicians more power.
We live safer and more healthy lives than any society in human history, yet politicians are trying to create the impression that there are threats everywhere--they have to, otherwise they become less and less relevant.
Pardon me if I'm a little stupid, I've had a few drinks. But at 200 million pounds that would pay for 400,000 extra police at 50,000 pounds for 10 years. Wouldn't 400,000 extra cops be a muc better deterent than any number of cameras. On another note, I'm curios where the 200 mil number came from, at 10,524 cameras that comes out to almost 20,000 pounds each. I know there's infrastructure costs involved but this just seems a little overblown. I'd love to see the actual data involved with this. Also what isn't stated is the crime rate in the areas with the cameras. Say for example an area without cameras has 100 crimes, 25 of which are solves. 25% solve rate. The areas with cameras say have 4 crimes, 1 is solved. This says something about the cameras as well but that data is missing from this article. Basically it comes down to this being a group with an agenda got a reporter to write an article, without all the data it's completely useless and biased.
Now I'm not for the camera's but I also don't necessarily think that the argument in the article is necessarily a stellar example of fighting it with numbers. I mean crime stats decreasing in areas due to successfully identifying the offender is one kind of win measurement, but I'd also like to put forward that if a crime remains unsolved because the camera's were able to clear people that might have been collared for it due to biased/lazy investigation then that is another kind of win. I'm not saying that this is the case or a reflection of what is really happening, I'm just putting it out there that identifying the offender and identifying the innocent should be seen as outcomes.
I just can't be bothered.
Better image quality is needed, not a greater physical count of cameras. If you can see a face, clothing detail, nipples through wet, white shirts, all the better. Analog CCTV has poor resolution. There will come a day.
A British politician is sure to say: "If 10,000 cameras don't work, let's just double the amount of cameras! That's sure to make crime go down!"
Where I come from in Scotland we have large numbers of cameras, particularly in the city centre where the intention is to reduce crime that is a by-product of drinking. The cameras are part of crowd control and very little else. I worked in a bar in the town centre and I can promise you nobody really took much notice of the cameras. Violence and breaches of the peace were reduced but people continued to consume drugs, misbehave and have sex in doorways. I remember once a guy, on his stag night was stripped butt naked, tied to a lamppost and whipped by his mates and although all of the cameras rotated to watch it, the police didn't arrive until it was all over and they were back in the pub (dressing him in a nappy, I might add for surrealistic effect).
I lived in what was considered the roughest area of the city and at a community council meeting, where some residents were a) demanding camera surveillance and b) drawing comparisons between how they were treated and the how more affluent areas of the city were treated, I suggested that we not only have the cameras but they could pipe it in to all our TV's and we then would could all see who the criminals were. It was roundly applauded, but we never did get the cameras.
Where I live now in South Germany, there are very few cameras apart from traffic control, you can drink for almost 24 hours a day and I have never witnessed street violence on par with my native country. You can drive your car at almost any speed you want on the Autobhan and Germany has the lowest level of Road Traffic Accidents per kilometre in the world - if you are like me tootling along in your truck at a snail's pace of 110 kph and stream of cars pass you with after-burners blazing at + 200 kph, this sounds rather surprising but it is true. If you do speed in the restricted areas and are caught on camera, you can request the photo. The photo is always a full frontal of you in the car with your face clearly visible. Some kids wave and legend has it, they get fined extra for lack of respect. My partner was hilariously caught speeding in a 15kph (!) zone, doing 20 and her employers presented her with the snap.
When I lived in Miami, I couldn't help but be impressed by how quiet the bars were and how friendly the Miami people were - and it's a party town, the bars are pretty wild. Both South Germany and Florida are dynamic economies and trading hubs. Scotland is neither or more accurately, there is less money in the economy. Florida has concealed gun laws and even the poorest South German has a remarkably high standard of living. In Switzerland almost everyone has a gun and for the purposes of civil defence were compelled to have one, and to generalise, they are fairly well off, have almost no crime and no cameras. Now I won't for a moment claim that my observation are anything other than anecdotal, but I also cannot help noticing the paucity of valid evidence either way. So I might dare to suggest that crime fighting cameras have more to do with poor economic performance - which is subject to the market and difficult to affect - and the symbolic effect they have on the electorate - and for that reason we might be looking in the wrong place for the evidence that either supports or demolishes the argument.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
Make every CCTV a Webcam. Why should they have all the fun?
"Deterring crime" is entirely different from "solving crime" for Fuchs' sake, yet the editor talks about the two as if they were synonymous. Can anyone suggest an IT news site like Slashdot but with a more professional editorial standard?
Forward to 2000 or thereabouts, and the police are remote figures in flak jackets, almost always inside cars. They are not part of the community, and most teenagers don't identify with them at all. The Government wants to reintroduce the village policeman, under the name of "Community support officers". And who opposes it? The police. The truth is, too much exposure to US TV programs (yes, a study in Manchester showed that some police there were consciously emulating "police" in cop shows) has poisoned their own perception of their role, and many of them are afraid that community police will be too successful.
Where I live, which is effectively a village on the edge of a small town, we now have these PCSOs. Many evenings I see them out talking to the kids on the street, just talking to them, like our village policemnan used to talk to us in the 1960s. The wheel is coming a bit full circle, and it's about time it did. Cameras are useless without the desire of the community to support its rule enforcers.
However, one big factor has changed. Our village policeman did not have to deal with large numbers of drunks about from 11p.m. to 4a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. He occasionally had to put a drunk in the cell, but that was about it. Community policing does not work in the UK's disgusting and horrible drunk culture because reasonable people cannot deal with aggressive, knife wielding drunks.(I'm allowed to say this; it's the most shameful thing about this country.) This is the root cause of the cameras. If we fixed the drunk problem, there would be no need for security cameras. This is one case where the US has mostly got it right and we have got it wrong, and I would vote unthinkingly for the first politician who was willing to bring in the laws that apply in Utah, or even Manhattan.
Pining for the fjords
As someone who is in London regularly I can assure you that CCTV obviously cuts crime. On more than one occasion I've encountered crackheads who present themselves as beggers or street dealers (I know, don't buy on the streets. I was young and naive once though!) and they'll do their utmost to try to get you out of the sight of CCTV so they can mug you. Also the CCTV on the tube means it's quite rare for people to get mugged down there and just about the only people who get cause trouble on buses are psychotic or psychopathic.
So yea, your average street mugger is definitely deterred to some extent by the presence of CCTV.
I currently live in Chippenham (UK). Some arsonists (a group of youths) set our car to fire. The police had them on CCTV, but since it was "dark and raining", they could not use them to identify anyone and just closed the case without even doing any serious investigation.
From this experience I'd say that these cameras are pretty useless. Most crime does not happen in bright daylight and when the sun is shining.
A motivated police man is more helpfull than a camera. He could have actually asked people if they have seen anything (you know, we have this two "build in" cameras and a pretty decent pattern recognition, all in all there are more than 100.000.000 installed in the UK).
The problem with filling your city with security cameras is, if your local police force (per-precinct) are incompetant, it doesn't fix anything. There is a careful balancing act of how well your local coppers do on catching criminals, and how many cameras they need.
What the article describes is a lackadaisical police force trying to solve their crime problem with cameras, which won't work. There are many instances where the local police are GOOD at what they do (after all they're league tabled just like everything in the UK) and where adding cameras to that cuts crime or improves the crime solving rate even further. That just isn't the case here.
After all, one of the 'advantages' of a camera-filled society is that crime is discouraged since it's all too easy for criminals to show their face or follow the criminal back to their city center council flat - and yes there are stupid ones who graffiti their name on the walls of the places they steal from who don't require cameras to drop themselves in it - but, if the police force are a bunch of idiots they won't be catching the guys that DO commit crimes in the first place. Having their face on camera does not mean an instant arrest..
I can understand that cameras in crime fighting may be a waste of time in cities like London where criminals use "clever" rather than violent tactics. Here in Johannesburg, the installation of CCTV cameras have brought the violent crime levels in the inner city down by 80%. We don't have debates here about civil rights and privacy laws - pretty much everyone is happy to be able to walk down the street and not being shot at every other day.
This image was on the front page of the Manchester Evening News last night. It appears to be a teenager holding an AK47 and aiming it at the cabin of a crane. The kid and his friend were sitting on a railway station platform at the time, so the Greater Manchester Police were alerted. By the time they had got themselves together the kids had got on a train, so the GMP alerted the British Transport Police, who are responsible for security on trains. The BTP refused to do anything about it saying that it was a matter for the GMP. Let's just remind ourselves that this is a couple of kids wandering around on the train network with an AK47, yet two police forces can't get it together to do anything about it. That's how well cameras work.
Politicians will simply ignore the facts and press ahead.
More importantly, us Brits will ignore the facts and vote for those kind of politicians. I know this, because I'm one of them. I just feel safer with security cameras around; they don't prevent crime, but they make it easier to solve it when it happens. Perhaps most relevant is that I don't feel I'm losing anything by having security cameras watch my every move. Frankly I don't care who knows my every move. You could track me by my mobile phone if you really wanted to.
The problem is that a lot of British criminals are too stupid to care whether they're going to get caught, and a lot of British policemen are mind-numbingly stupid underachievers who enjoy bullying people but aren't actually mentally competent enough to follow through a criminal procedure to an actual conviction.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
CCTV probably doesn't necessarily prevent crime, but if a criminal is caught (by whatever means), footage of his crime is invaluable in court. I'd like to see the figures comparing sentences of criminals accused of similar crimes, with some having CCTV footage of their crimes and some not. If there's doubt/no proof of their actions in court, they're likely to get away with it.
I know it's not 'a la mode' in slashdot to consider CCTV useful, but I'd imagine more assholes are put away thanks to it.
http://www.frenchgeek.com/
While I'm not a big fan of the "war on drugs", I will give the police credit for breaking up some of the most notorious local gangs/crews, which were responsible for many murders. In recent years, MS-13 has become a problem in my area, and I support any efforts to lock them up and deport them.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Cameras are often viewed, by people who should know better, as a _replacement_ for proper policing. Unfortunately, cameras do not act as a long term deterent and so crime at best stays stable. It could go up.
Assume for the moment that the intended (as opposed to publicly stated) purpose of all those cameras is to prevent/fight crime. Even if so, any crime fighting tool is only as good as the people who use them. If you have a police force that is not very efficient at preventing or solving crimes to begin with, adding more equipment is probably not going to significantly improve their batting average.
Security cameras are not terribly useful (if at all) for preventing crime. They may be one potential tool (among many) to help solve a crime that has already occurred, and effect an arrest. But even that is problematic -- it assumes that the crime takes place in front of a camera, and that the perpetrator is sufficiently identifiable in the image, to the exclusion of others. If the image is blurry, or the thug wears dark glasses and a ski cap, or is only seen from the back or with poor lighting, you're SOL. Only if the criminal has something uniquely identifiable about him or her (an obvious or unusual physical defect or mannerism, a piece of clothing with a logo or writing that somehow narrows down the possibilities) is the image going to be of any use at all. Even then, it is not likely to be a case-breaking "smoking gun" piece of evidence (only on L&O or CSI do such lucky breaks tend to happen), but merely one small piece of evidence among many that, cumulatively, may be enough to convince a jury of someone's guilt. The image can sometimes give police a better idea of what happened and how it all went down -- it rarely is going to give them a better idea of who did it above and beyond what clues can be gained from any typical eyewitness' generic description (approximate height and weight, race, build,, sex, etc.)
Anyway, how many of those cameras may be decoys, or if working are not contantly and actively monitored? The only true benefit of security cameras is p.r. -- it gives the generally ignorant public a false sense of security.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Are people comitting crimes in front of the cameras? If not then the problem is the coverage not that cameras don't work. That is, they work were they cover, and it's the non-covered areas that are more dangerous. You can't cover everywhere, but you can constrain the danger zones this way and then add solutions to the mix.
I wonder if these areas already had below average crime solution? Did it get better?
Surly they just wathc it happen also its not like the police do anything when presented with eveidence unless the press get behind it.
You can use them to "prove" anything.
Other people have already talked about volume vs percentage, so I'll ask a different question: might it not be that those areas with lots of cameras but no better crime solving rate, are in fact only keeping up with the areas with fewer cameras *because* they have cameras? That is, if you took away the cameras, would their crime solving rate drop even lower?
Note that I'm no fan of a surveillance society, but I am even more against bogus logic and misuse of statistics. We're supposed to be better than that.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The number of crimes solved is no indicator of the number of crimes deterred by the cameras. Arguing that the cameras are a failure because the police in certain locations aren't arresting more people is tantamount to saying that the police themselves are failures and should be removed.
To measure the effectiveness of the cameras as a deterrent to crime, you would need to measure the number of crimes that do not take place. Good luck with that.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The reported crime clear up rates fluctuated between 21% and 25%, and one of the four burroughs did see an improvement. There are so many different factors involved in this rate, such as the composition of the type of crimes in a neighbourhood and what exactly means "solved" for each crime. I wouldn't be surprised if the reported claim falls outside the confidence interval for a statistically meaningful statement, but the police lack the math to judge that.
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
Great. So stop the war and drugs and watch 50% of Americans become hooked on coke, instead of just a few Hollywood idiots. Great idea. So NOT spending ANY money is going to make the drug situation better? I'm glad, then, that politicians don't pay attention to the facts, because at least they are doing SOMETHING about it.
"Could this be an effective argument against the proliferation of cameras or will politicians simply ignore the facts and press ahead?"
Neither. It is a bad argument. Nobody has ever made the argument that using cameras makes areas the safest areas (that is, safer than non-camera areas). The argument is that it makes them SAFER areas (than they were). Without longitudinal data, nobody can argue either way.
This story is flamebait.
"You'd have a point if this wasn't simply the latest in a string of studies that all showed the same thing."
Well you're certainly hanging a big hat upon the assumption that those studies are correct and this is flawed.
"Instead of rushing to apply logic, you should have spent a bit more time learning about all the data that was available."
I believe his complaint was the absence of some data. And I'd rather someone make the attempt to use some logic instead of what passes for logic around here. That too may be an unfair criticism but it's better than the alternative.
Sarcasm is a bit pointless as well. You're probably not as fucking clever as you think you are, whatever IQ you have. Get over yourself.
A surveillance society is not about helping to catch criminals. It is all about making the populace terrified to do anything that might offend the powers-in-charge.
... but, dang it, the tin-foil hat wearing libertarians have it right.
Typically they are "sold" to the public under the guise of fighting crime, as nobody wants to stand in the way of a murderer being subjected to justice of the people.
The real reason though is that government's largest risk of being put out of power is not criminals or foreign enemies, but their own people. By making the people feel their every move is cataloged and noted by the government, they are (by and large) made afraid to do anything their government may see as problematic, reducing government's risk of the people demonstrating, peacefully or not.
The cameras were never about fighting crime, they are there both as a panacea for the people and more importantly, a means of control.
I may sound like a tin-foil hat wearing libertarian here
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
His notion isn't popular in some circles, and there probably isn't enough evidence to say conclusively whether he is correct, but this is what I got out of it: If you want to stop crime, you don't wait until people are criminals, you improve the society so people don't want to commit crimes.
I'm going to stop with that idea before I really start to ramble.
Really, shouldn't these guys go read the dummies guide to statistics ?
a) Are places with high crime more likely to install cameras ?
b) Are places with low % of solved crime more likely to install cameras ?
c) Can you fairly compare rate of crime solution without some idea of level of crime, size of police force, police budget per reported crime, police budget per resident ?
If they really wanted information rather than headlines, they would compare before and after statistics in each area.
This is the kind of crap that gives statistics a bad name.
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
On a scale of 1-10, a camera is a deterant of maybe 3.
.40SW.... 10
.40.... very high.
Thinking the guy you are about to rob has a Heckler and Koch USP
Odds of running into someone in England with a HK USP40, less than 0.1%
Odds of running into me with a HK USP
Legalize drugs and they are out of business overnight.
By this simple technique.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The cameras can be very useful, eg The london murder squad has one of the highest clearup rates in the world, but thats only because time is taken to analyse carefully whats on the tapes.
Like many things they are a tool, analysis based on just the number of cameras cannot tell you anything.
...you pricks waste time arguing here. As long as no one does anything and just bitches, everything will be fine.
While I agree with what you're saying, the thing is: politicians aren't ignoring facts, they're misinterpreting them. People tend to assume that processes are basically linear, that if you push something twice as hard it'll go twice as far. I don't think the general public, in most countries, is in favor of legalizing drugs, so there are going to be some laws about/against drug sales. If you go from no enforcement at all, to some enforcement, you'll see a drop in drug sales. That establishes the idea in people's heads that all we need is more, stronger enforcement, to stop drugs once and for all. The problem is that it's probably a high-order exponential relationship between enforcement and drug usage: to absolutely stop any and all drug usage would require a nightmarish police state.
But, fundamentally, the underlying idea isn't *wrong* -- if you fight drugs harder, you will reduce drug use. The problem is that the demand for drugs is so very high, that someone will always be willing to risk being caught, and no amount of money, cops, or laws will be able to *stop* the drug trade. Trying to fight a largely inelastic demand means spending stupid, wasteful amounts of money for microscopic gains. Meanwhile, cops and politicians are being pushed by people who believe that if you try hard enough you can do anything, so they *have* to keep doing what they're doing. They're not ignoring the facts: they're doing what a large part of the public wants them to do. The fundamental problem is, that large part of the public does not understand and does not wish to understand the drug trade and the supply/demand issues, so they push the cops and politicians to try and do impossible things.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
and the dozen or so police brutality videos that have cropped up on YouTube (taserings, taser-killings, Old man face in asphalt) I'm convinced that it is WE should have cameras, not the government. I didn't see a single cop get his ass kicked all week.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Actually, I remember a story about a town in Britain where they just put up signs saying "Hey crooks, cameras here!", rather than the cameras themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
--Pete
I think you'll find that anyone who wants coke can get it. What's the point of spending all this money to keep coke away from people who don't want it? Do you know anyone who's waiting until coke is legalized to go have a line?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Is invasion of privacy. I should have the right to not be spied upon and recorded for no good reason.
I've been upgraded to "bad"!
Seriously, get a clue. So NOT spending ANY money is going to make the drug situation better? It certainly wouldn't make it any worse and the money you do spend could go to areas that have much more effect. Namely, drug education (prevention) and treatment. I'm glad, then, that politicians don't pay attention to the facts, because at least they are doing SOMETHING about it. Yeah screw the facts, spend spend spend!
All this does is preserve the black market. The existance of the black market greatly exacerbates the crimes associated with the sale of drugs, drives the price of drugs up and thus increases crimes committed by addicts in order to continue their drug use.
History and every civilization on earth have shown us that certain people are going to use drugs whether they are illegal or not. The effect this has on society as a whole is mainly the effect that *the reaction of society itself* has to it and not the actual use.
Though I tend to be more libertarian about it and would rather not have anything spent on it whatsoever - I have to say the $65 billion or so dollars would be much better spent on things such as drug education/prevention, drug treatment, youth/community centers, etc..
> The study found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas
> with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.
Hmmmm. Have they been any more effective in tracking the legal activities of citizens for nefarious government purposes?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You can't take the sky from me...
No. Just because you contradict the statement, doesn't make you right. That's the entire point of actually doing studies. To try to determine what's actually the case, not just blindly support what you want to believe. Whether you happen to like this particular study or not, it's only one of an ever growing number that support the same conclusion. Cameras do not have the effect you describe, but an entirely different one.
While having a clearly low opinion of people in general (I take it you're not a particularly nice person yourself, but are yourself intimidated by cameras?), you do seem to put a finger on the real problem with a surveillance society:
"Much suspicious activity" translates to mean 'things that were legal, but that lead the watcher to wonder if a person might actually be doing something wrong'. Odds are, the person is not.
But, now, faceless authorities are 'suspicious' of that person. And today, technology being what it is, that individual may now be in a database of 'suspicious persons' somewhere, having really done nothing. Much like the secret 'no fly' lists, who target many innocent people (along with some not so nice ones), all in the name of claiming to do something, without really accomplishing anything at all. Once your on said list, even if completely by mistake, there's now no way off of it. Even when it's a known error. All because some bureaucrat has the ability to add someone, but no one seems to have the will or ability to remove someone from such lists.
As for your "halo effect", most folks likely don't think at all most of the time about the fact that they're being watched on camera. Most probably don't really even realize it, or think about it. If they really did they'd probably be disturbed by it. Thinking people are appropriately disturbed by the idea of 'Big Brother' constantly watching their every move.
Yes. Odds are that they are good, normal, upstanding people. I would not describe 'wooden behavior in public', nor the stress you describe from constant surveillance to be either desirable or healthy. Such a surveillance society does not make people safer. What it does do is create FUD -- Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
The point is, for whatever reasons, your vaunted cameras do not catch 'very frightening criminals'. They do not prevent serious, bad things from happening. They only really target normal, law abiding people, and change their behavior.
Cameras do nothing to stop terrorists, for instance. They do not deter them. They do not prevent their acts. At best, they might help track them after such an act. But, that does nothing for the victims. And, if such 'very frightening people' are aware of the cameras, or even take into account that there might be cameras, they will take measures not to be recognized, in which case, the cameras also have no real deterrent effect. Even the
I'm no fan of the camera's; but they're only one aspect of Britain's Orwellian Law Enforcement plan. I'm mainly opposed to cameras because I hate the idea of a government surveillance society, not because I believe they're ineffective. Perhaps they are effective, and their deterrent effect is being offset by other crime-increasing policies?
I think there are important lessons to learn in understanding why London's crime rate has been soaring while New York's has been plummeting, but I don't think we're even close to fully understanding the causes of these trends or their relevant contributions. It's a ripe field for analysis.
Separately, the information provided in that summary makes the research appear extremely unscientific. This article makes no mention of the changes in clear-up rates over time with the installation of cameras, only comparisons across precincts. But surely there were differences in clear-up rates across precincts before the cameras. At any rate, this article only addresses the cameras in terms of solving crimes, which may be entirely irrelevant to their value if their primary benefit is deterrence.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Often find that the ROI for it is far far less than they ever believed.
For one thing, the concept that one is safe is a pleasant, but untrue, myth.
For another, one's rights given away are difficult to wrest back.
And we always believe such intrusive actions will stop people, when in point of fact it's the likelihood of not just apprehension, but trial, sentencing, and jail term that is processed by those who do criminal activities.
Hoodies are easy to wear. Spanners fit in one's briefcase. Spray paint can be fit into various innocuous devices. And some people know they have less than a 0.001 percent chance of ever serving a day in jail for a crime anyway. Or they just don't care.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I've come to the opinion that the primary lobbyists behind the "War on Drugs" are the drug lords themselves -- because said "war" keeps prices artificially high. And of course the enforcement bureaus are all for it, because the confiscation of private property brings in millions, perhaps billions of dollars.
But as an effective deterrent? Not hardly. If it were, then why is the market so strong? Acto some figures, marijuana is California's #1 cash crop!
Legalise, tax, and regulate it just like we do alcohol and tobacco, and 99% of the crime-and-police aspects of the problem go away overnight. (Yeah, there'll be a few bootleggers. Small potatoes.) Morons will still fry their brains, nothing changes there, except that maybe they'll be more willing to get help if there's no risk of being thrown in jail on top of it.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Fools, Why didn't they use 10,001 cameras?!
Be gone from my sight or prepare to feel my flaming wraith!
Of course they'll ignore the facts, it's what they always do. They don't give a damn about what the people want, they don't realise that we elected them to do what we want them to do, they just care about their own personal agenda.
The article does not state the area of each borough, population, size of police force, and many other factors that would be needed to make any meaningful comparison. In other words, rubbish journalism.
10,000 cameras by themselves don't do squat. Who is watching the feed, and what do they do if they find something weird happening ? This simply means automated video analysis, video data mining, face and gait analysis etc are not up to scratch yet. They need people to use the data, and this is such a boring job that it can't be done well.
I've come to the opinion that the primary lobbyists behind the "War on Drugs" are the drug lords themselves -- because said "war" keeps prices artificially high.
Actually it's the legal drug lords. The alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical industries. They all stand to lose big if marijuana is legal.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That only explains laws against marijuana (tho as I understand it, originally that was big wood-pulp interests killing the hemp market, and absolutely nothing to do with smokable pot). It doesn't explain coke, heroin, meth, etc.
And it also doesn't explain this: If "recreational drugs" were legal, what's to stop the current pharmaceutical, tobacco, and alcohol interests from ADDING rec-drugs to their marketing arsenal?? They could make a shitload of money from it!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I strongly recommend the documentary EVERY STEP YOU TAKE for a critical an in-depth approach to CCTV in Britain. I heard it will be on air in UK soon, and also released on DVD. I've seen the film at Cambridge Film Festival this year and was impressed that a foreigner (Austrian-born director Nino Leitner) was able to pull off an extremely informative documentary about such a uniquely British topic.
Check out the trailer, and you'll see what I mean: http://www.everystepyoutake.org/