Slashdot Mirror
CCTVs Don't Work in the UK
ShakaUVM writes "People who give up a little bit of liberty for a little bit of security deserve neither, the saying goes. But what happens when people give up so much liberty their entire country resembles an Orweillean dystopia — but the pervasive monitoring doesn't help to solve any crimes? That's what is happening in the United Kingdom today. While the Guardian tries to put a good spin on the entire fiasco, the fact remains that CCTVs only help with 3% of all street robberies, the very crimes they were supposed to be best at protecting.
Should England finally move to eliminate its troubling state surveillance program?"
Orwellian dystopia? I spend a few months over there earlier this year and must have missed that bit...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Yes.
I mean, is there really any doubt in anyone's mind? Continually infringing upon the privacy of the innocent does nothing to prevent the crimes of the guilty.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
Sure, they work on homes or parking lots where the crook can just walk down the block to a non-camera lot but it's not like the crooks in the UK are going to boat over to the next island that doesn't have mass CCTV, is it?
My work here is dung.
More to the point, other countries (like mine) should look to England's failed example and refuse to follow it.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Don't compare the opression Benjamin Franklin and our other founding fathers lived through with a few cameras in public areas. These monitor the same things that any police officer can without a warrant.
Ummm lets do that 1984 Checklist
1) Government declares an unwinable war against a changing opponent and people listen - Nope, most brits were against Iraq and almost everyone (even some in government) think it was the wrong target in retrospect.
2) Government demonstrates effective control over people - nope they can't even hold onto CDs
3) Government enforces complete control of society and the media - Nope, they get slated everywhere
4) Abandonment of the rule of law when they choose - nope they can't even get the detention extension they want
Ahh but there are CCTV cameras which catch bugger all information. Maybe the CCTV cameras should go but lets be clear this isn't about liberty and security its purely a cost control mechanism, its a free market decision in otherwords.
Go and read 1984 before talking about dystopia and ask yourself where you can find a country that actively spys on its citizens and where senior people state they are above the rule of law.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The thing with our company's CCTV system is that the pictures it records to the HDD are so low res that you can't even make out people's faces. The video feed itself isn't too bad, but what's the use when the evidence is that poor? I'm not sure what official police CCTV records are like of course, hopefully they allow for more "the suspect was wearing a stripey jumper and a hat"
which is totally what she said
The idea behind CCTVs is deterrence, right? We disincentivize street crime by raising the chances that the criminal will get caught. Except, when has getting caught bothered a criminal? The CCTV system assumes a set of motivations that the average well-off, law-abiding citizen has. But most robbers are not robbing for sport; either they're dirt-poor, or they're addicts. Getting out of heroin withdrawal is such a strong desire that the threat of jail becomes abstract in comparison. So what if the cameras see me?
The point put forward in TFA is that the risk of being on camera is a preventive measure. The 3% figure is a meaningless figure when it comes to measuring the preventive effect in my opinion. When measuring efficiency, one would like to know the relative frequency of street robberies before and after a CCTV introduction.
I'm skeptical that the system brings benefits to outweigh the cost, but we should at least argue honestly about the system's alleged efficiency.
political opposition IS "Terrorism" and crime.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Orwell's dystopia was hardest on office workers. Of course everyone suffered grinding poverty, ignorance, cruelty and lack of freedom but only the more educated members of the state knew better. Anyone from the working class that did notice would be drafted into the continuous and intentionally wasteful war of the day. Office workers lived under a constant purge. The nastiest part about a real dystopia is that people believe with all of their might, effort and 2 minutes hate that nothing could be better. "Ordinary" life goes on for the vast majority.
Things are not that bad yet but the apparatus is incomplete. Journalist and bloggers are harassed for their opinions today. With just a little less freedom, as in Russia, they will be murdered. The US NeoCons are building red light cameras in the US and praying for another false flag operation like 9/11. They already have ChoicePoint and other databases to track opposition but they don't quite have public support for it or more. Free flowing information on the internet has prevented that, so look for broadcast media to become more insane and more to be done to kill the internet.
But, that doesn't seem to be the case. People aren't concerned about it:
That doesn't sound like people are worried about the eye in the sky at all. It sounds like they're ignoring it, and the police are finding the system too damned awkward to actually retrieve the useful images.
First off, kudos for the public shag.
But, how can you on the one hand say you don't mind the eye in the sky, and on the other hand be somewhat surprised that the bored operator wouldn't zoom in on that if he saw you doing something naughty in a park? If you know they're watching, why would you be surprised they actually did watch?
I mean, it's not like the police are swamping the operators with requests for the images. In all likelihood, he and a bunch of guys pass around copies of all the public nookie they observe. I'm sure there's a whole underground trade in CCTV porn -- from what I hear, there should be a lot of material in the UK.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The 3% refers to solved crimes.
The amount of crimes prevented is unknown.
As a friend put it, he hopes they put more cameras up because that way it will be even harder to actually get anything done with them.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
No, Americans' big problem with being recorded has nothing to do with liberty and freedom. It has everything to do with being a record of their stupidity, bad behavior, and criminality. And, even then, most people only care about it if it impacts them negatively.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The introduction on CCTV (as well as new stadium improvements and regulations recommended in the Taylor Report) are credited with ending mainstream hooliganism in England. CCTV was used to find those responsible for acts of unruly and destructive behaviour associated with football matches and punish them. For me this is enough reason to support CCTV.
... after all it is in public.
But then again I don't really have a problem with being filmed while in public
Perhaps most of the footage never gets seen. That makes sense; there is just too much of it. However, if they get reports of people protesting, or handing out opinionated fliers, they have that footage, and the opportunity to do something about it.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
You seem to be operating under the notion that companies install CCTV systems to protect victims of crimes that occur on company property.
This, however, is business and not altruism. Businesses need CCTV to protect themselves from prosecution and to ease the insurance claims process. For example, they need to know that some guy in a hoodie ran up to that old lady, threw her on to the ground and ran off, not that she slipped on the wet surface left by an employee. They definitely care about that. The identity of the attacker? Not so much. So the expenses surrounding the recording and storage of high-resolution images is simply overkill for the company's needs.
Let me quote the article:
The video, shot by a WTXF-TV helicopter, shows three police cars stopping a car on the side of a road.So are you suggesting we use news choppers for surveillance? That article has NOTHING to do with CCTV.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Bet you wouldn't say that if you were the victim of the 3% that solved. 3% is not as insignificant as it sounds, 1 in 30, and that's not counted the fact there preventative too.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Many average people "feel" safer, and that's an effect I'm sure that the government wants - the feeling of security. (Intellectuals and generally-educated people know that this is a farce, but Joe Six Pack doesn't know any better - he just feels better. "The cameras MUST work - they're still up.")
The same effect is felt with photo radar here in Arizona. A recent survey said that 7 out of 10 people "feel" safer with photo radar on the roads (I'm in the 30% minority), even though they don't really make drivers safer.
It's the same reason to be happy about RIAA strategy. They fail so badly their tactics will be much harder to use anywhere else.
You're optimistic. In politics, results do not feature strongly in the feedback cycle; politicians are not typically looking to see whether a policy achieves its purported end, but rather that it will be tolerated by the people.
That is: experiments test feasibility to a politician, not utility.
The politician's mode of thinking is not strongly connected to any kind of scientific reasoning, but rather to correct intent ("evil" must be "fought against") and, to some extent, social theory. They understand democracy as a check upon the excesses of "theory", but they do not consider theory in the scientific sense, but rather in the social science sense.
Is it any wonder that politicians and their kin in management talk of the "difference between theory and practice"?
Wikileaks, no DNS
The debate, once again, should not be around a particular method of law-enforcement, but whether 100% effective law-enforcement is desirable...
It means, you can not exceed speed-limit by 1 mile/h, nor drop a candy-wrap on the street, nor ask for money on subway. You will also not be beaten by a cop, nor will they be able to treat fire-hydrants as special parking spots reserved for "the force". Etcaetera...
Do we want the laws obeyed and enforced 100%, or do we want to live some "wriggle-room" for the dystopian future, when it will be needed to fight some kind of oppression?
I would say that yes, we want laws to be 100% enforced. But we need to get rid of 99% of the laws. The alternative is laws that everyone is guilty of violating, and enforcers who can immediately find a reason to arrest and convict anyone they see fit.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
In first world countries, government is always the biggest impediment to freedom. Anything that makes a powerful government more powerful is an impediment to freedom.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
"how can I make these cameras work to fight crime better?"
Try clubbing them with the cameras? Sell the cameras and use the money to do something useful?
Crime is a symptom, not a disease. Treating everyone like criminals - whether via surveillance or fencing in your neighbourhood - is a losing strategy because it discounts what you mean to preserve.
But according to this article, blanketing the nation with CCTV doesn't have the same effect on either the city of London or the country as a whole. Implementing mass surveillance of all Her Majesty's subjects going about their daily business neither reduces crime nor leads to significantly more convictions. CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure, [but]
in the cellphones and hands of every day citizens
(smacks forehead)
not very orwellian, this cameraphone in every hand on the street, is it? so how does that fact jive with orwell's vision of the future?
it doesn't!
BECAUSE IT WAS JUST A FAIRY TALE, NOT DEAD ACCURATE FORTUNE TELLING
so will some of you PLEASE lose your deathgrip on the dead, innaccurate foretelling of 1984 already?
people have the stereotypical orwellian view of big brother so firmly entrenched in their head, they completely miss out on the fact that what orwell wrote was a useful bit of science fiction, not prescient reality. and that reality, while hewing to some of the larger themes of what orwell wrote, is in fact fundamentally different and falls into a completely different reality:
little brother
that is, cameras everywhere, everywhere in the hands of people on the street, witnesses, not agents of an autocratic government. technology is something that is never the complete monopoly and dominance of the government. so i have two words for you:
rodney king
please, people, 1984 is a dead parable about our future. please stop using orwell and 1984 in how you form a vision of our future or our present. it simply isn't valid, isn't accurate, and isn't valuable in forming a useful understanding of your government and your reality. reality is a lot more complex, and fundamentally different than orwell's old fiction
i suppose we're going to split up into morlock and eloi too? to suppose so is the same kind of idiocy to extrapolate such presumed accuracy from a fairy tail like 1984. orwell wrote a nice story folks, not the damn magna carta. please understand that
1984=dead fiction. not the prescient future
really
get over big brother, i'm so sick of that dead, inaccurate vision
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Oh boy, I can see it now. My fellows will surely welcome the chance to harass their "neighbors" &c.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Well that's just it, a lot of the time they DON'T know, they just assume because you walked from a certain direction (i.e. one side of the bridge to the other) that you MUST be a certain one.
I mean some people make it "obvious" by wearing Celtic or Rangers shirts (one is predominantly Catholic, one is predominantly Protestant, for the uninformed), some people simply open their mouths (thick English accent? You must be protestant) and others let slip that they're called Patrick or Billy or something to that end.
But at the end of the day it IS stupid and these days, most of the ones causing trouble do it simply because it's fun.
I've personally encountered people I've KNOWN to be protestant wearing a Celtic (extremely catholic) top, going around asking people what team they support just to catch them out so they have a "reason" to attack them.
Hell, half of the riots are planned well in advance so all their mates can join in, stock up supplies of petrol bombs, bricks and so on...
In case you're wondering, I moved away from Northern Ireland and have no intention of ever going back. Can't think why.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Did you know that in the US, because it's legal for people to walk around with guns...
Not for much longer, if various legislative asshats and the loudmouthed morons who push them have anything to say about it. If you want to carry a gun, better move to Montana or some other state that still has a clue. Washington, my home state, is pretty good too but Seattle is a really bad influence on freedom to carry.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
Hominids won the Hugo or the Nebula award (I can't remember which at the moment). Check it out. I'd like to see those cameras made available to the public to scrutinize at their leisure. They would be effective if they were.
I envision a system where every person has a personal recorder that they carry around, and all the output of public cameras is mirrored and shared in a fashion that made it difficult to tamper with. Something along the lines of Freenet, except simplified by the fact that you don't have to anonymize the sources.
Any time there was a contested event, it would be possible to examine the footage from the CCTVs and from the personal data recorders of both parties. Barring a sophisticated attack, this would give you the facts right away. And, if someone tried to tamper with the public record and there were any anomilies, then you could start looking at where they came from with lots of forensic data available.
This would have all sorts of rewards... we would be able to watch the watchers, and we would be able to clearly see those ill conceived laws that are being casually broken all over the place so we could remove them from the books. This would protect us from selective enforcement of laws that aren't meant to be obeyed, but only grant power to the rulers.
And unfortunately, freedom-limiting measures are welcomed by a majority of people on this sceptred isle - two such examples are ID cards (which were overwhelmingly popular until it emerged that people were going to have to pay for them - and not just a token "don't lose it" fee) and 42-day detention without trial (which remains popular with just about everyone, because they somehow believe that it'll "only catch the bad guys"). My family still live in the town which first proclaimed that it had 100% CCTV coverage, and they said it made them feel safer - even though my brother-in-law has been hauled over by police a couple of times for trying to use an ATM at midnight. Yet it doesn't appear to have made the King's Lynn I remember (and ran the hell away from a decade ago) any less prone to violence or vandalism...
The great advantage of having perception define reality, rather than vice versa, is that it merely requires that people trust their perception unquestioningly. Manipulate their perception and they'll swallow any bullshit you throw at them.
Allright! If I see that hippie smoking marijuana then I can dedicate my time to help incarcerate him! I never liked that guy, his raibowy t-shirt bugged the hell out of me.
The point being that it takes sane law for this to happen. If you comandeered a camera only to catch somebody smoking pot, would you rat them out? Smoking pot is, after all, illegal here.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
No, it is not semantics. He only found it offensive because he was trying to use public space for private activity.
Would he have found it offensive if he had not been performing a private act? No, he would not have even noticed the camera was there. He only cared when he felt it invaded his (non-existent) privacy.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
"I'd like to see those cameras made available to the public to scrutinize at their leisure. They would be effective if they were."
Are you nuts or just being funny? Do you think the community makes a good police force? Ever heard of a mob?
You'd have petty bitches using it to harass people, identity thieves and stalkers using it to spy on people, and spammers would find a way to inject ads into the feeds (cardboard signs?). You know, just like the Intarweb.
Making available clips of a crime might possibly help find assailants or witnesses (doubtful), but police work belongs to cops who are paid to do their job and assigned accountability (supposedly) for the work they do.
In any event, the primary goal of cameras isn't to solve crimes, but to prevent them, or at least move them to other areas. That's the same reason people put security cameras on their house. If it wasn't effective, it wouldn't be a big industry.
Real life almost never fits the vague, incorrect, or incomplete wording of the laws and it's simply not feasible to expect the laws to always cover every situation.
I disagree with the assumption that laws cannot cover every situation. It is entirely reasonable to think that we could make a much smaller set of laws that would cover every necessary situation. A great deal of what is currently regulated should not be regulated. There are vast areas of law that are about forcing people to behave in a fashion that benefits a few corrupt people, and you can't imagine living in a world that was any different. That is why you feel the way you do.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I'm more interested in how many crimes are prevented by the presence of CCTV. This is much harder to monitor, but deterrence is better than the post-crime investigation that the summary seems to be focussed on. I remember standing in many's a chip shop late at night and seeing potential fights diffused because the drunken potential fighters knew they were on camera. Also, I don't know why so many people on this thread have gone off into the weeds talking about 1984. Last time I checked, there was no Ministry of Truth in the UK, the media (particularly the BBC) give the government a grilling on a daily basis that would horrify the average American politician, and there is NOT a camera in everyone's bedroom.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
But the camera being "there" is useless if nobody is watching it. Why do you "feel" 100x safer (surely not based on statistical evidence) if you're not paying taxes to have someone watch the video feed real-time?
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
You are allowed to, if you have undergone the proper training, and background check (IE on/off duty air-marshals, etc.)
if airbags/helmets/shoulder belts/child seats/carbon monoxide detectors, etc, etc must all be useless. (ok air bags are the only one of these strictly banned.)
clearly a properly trained person is not only safer, but everyone around them is safer having a concealed weapon (despite all the FUD surrounding the misconception that their weapon firing would tear apart a airliner.)
Cameras don't prevent crime, they help capture criminals.
Because once the state grabs power and deprives the citizenry (subjects, in this case)of some right it will never let go. Like another failed theory, gun control, "it doesn't work, we need more". Z_B
No one with your level of naivety and ignorance should speak in public. There are anti-social people in the world who consider other people resources and prey, and they rule the day when common men do not stand up to them.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Where are you living that the UK is much safer?
You know that the different states over here have much different crime rates, right?
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
"A retired military man with a German Shepard, a baseball bat and some good intel" chasing people he considers undesirables from the streets merely to increase the amount of money he can get from his house sure sounds like one of them.
So it seems.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Morpheus: "The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it. "
-FL