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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?"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
It seems most people think there is this huge government-funded network of cameras watching every move of every person in the UK - this just isn't the case. The vast majority (~80%) of this camera network are the ones in shops, on transport (buses, trains), on ATM's, etc. etc. In other words, they're privately owned and run for the benefit of the business owner, not for the police.
Of the remainder, the vast majority of them are traffic-cameras at junctions, in speed-cameras (yes, these count, for some reason), etc. What's left are the police-owned ones which watch people in high-crime areas or (usually in partnership with the businesses) high-people-traffic areas (eg: Regent St., Oxford St. in London).
I lived in London for ~15 years before moving to CA. I don't feel any less "observed" here than I did in London. I'm on-camera in CA if I get money from an ATM; if I drive across a junction (try looking up once in a while); if I get on the BART; if I get on Caltrain; if I go to a bank;
I really wish people would stop pandering to the tabloid press trying to sell copy. Sure, there are cameras. Everywhere(*). Deal.
Simon
(*)Well, every country I've been to, anyway.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.
Obviously if the CCTV cameras we have today only help prevent 3% of crimes, then we need about 33x more cameras!
All hail our great overseers!
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I completely agree. If Matt Damon can outmaneuver them how difficult can it be?
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
In fact, the thought that they could help if I were to be in a tight-spot is actually reassuring. People think twice about doing stupid things if they know there's an eye in the sky watching them.
I have however had one objection; I caught one blatantly checking me and one ex-girlfriend "making out" (let's say) in a park once. The dirty bastard on the end even nodded the camera at me in recognition I'd caught him watching it all.
throw new NoSignatureException();
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
Are the cameras in Scotland, Wales, or the other parts of the United Kingdom any better at helping to solve street crime?
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
That depends on your definition of freedom.
Americans are really big on the right to privacy, so being recorded as soon as you step outside your house is a huge loss of freedom for us.
Europeans are more used to government control, with mandatory registration of your residence and mandatory IDs.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
If it weren't for the cameras, the pigs would've denied everything.
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?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
You could gut the cameras and leave the housings in place. Remove the lens glass and viola!--you have nice little bird houses everywhere in the city. Someone get the environmental lobby on this angle, stat!
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
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
At Heathrow, my laptop needed re-charging. So, I found a power socket, and sat down and started inserting my power converter/adapter into it. The thing looks like an ordinary wall-mounted brick adapter.
Within 5 minutes, I was surrounded by three guys in uniform asking me what I was doing.
I said I am just trying to charge my laptop.
They looked at the adapter, then at the laptop, then at my face. They just stood there looking confused not saying anything. I picked up my stuff, said thanks and just walked away. They didnt follow me or anything.
Weird.
Having surveillance is fine but having smarter people who know how to analyze what they see is even more important.
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.
But it's not mandatory that you get a driver's license, or voters registration. If you want to live on a farm with no contact to the outer world, you're free to do so. I don't even think you are legally required to have to have a SSN. Not so in most European countries, it's a misdemeanor to not be registered.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
Okay, so the CC monitoring hasn't slashed violent/street crime, and it hasn't been a panacea for law enforcement/prosecution of crimes - but it has provided tons (tonnes?) of footage for "Wildest Police Video XXIV" and "FHV" . . .
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.
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/
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"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.
Fair point, though the only times we've used our CCTV is to try and sort out who scratched what car in the car park, who it was that tried to steal a bunch of copper wire from our yard, who broke into that car across the road, etc etc. I can see how it would also be useful for full on corporate deniability though. Our main problem at the moment is that the lighting in some areas around the building is pretty poor, but they've STILL not done anything about that even after I specifically highlighted (no pun intended) it last year..
which is totally what she said
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
In my part of the UK, the spy cameras were installed under the pretext of protecting the people, only the idiots bought that excuse, and they've been proved to be mostly useless for that proported use.
April 2008, the law in the UK was changed by the government which now allows any official spy camera to be used for "traffic enforcement" (more easy money).
Lo and behold one week into this new scheme, in my local area a woman was attacked and sexually assaulted at a bus stop while waiting for a bus. What happened we'll never 100% know, because the camera operator was more interested in catching motorists going in a wrong lane, then to record video of tha assault and catch the guy that did the assault (what the camera was installed for in the first place).
The whole camera installation nationwide is for state surveillance of you, and it feels really uncomfortable knowing you are being filmed walking or driving around, whilst criminals remain untouchable and don't give a damn about the cameras.
Resist the cameras in your country, or suffer the surveillance fate of the UK.
Take Nobody's Word For 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.
1. we get an army of CCTV operators more than willing to ensure that any misdemeanour does not go unnoticed.
2. we keep the OAPs off the streets, and put them in a safe, warm environment
3. the investment in CCTVs pays off as every camera gets a dedicated viewer.
4. respect for pensioners increases as every young buck would know that to insult an OAP would have them on the lookout for him.
Obviously this would be good for society and keep the pensioners happy as they love nothing better than sitting around watching what's going on.
You'd think easy access to drugs and prostitutes would be a selling point.
Oppressing an entire population is never cheap.
--Jeckler (/. Beta IS GARBAGE!)
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.
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.
This is true. However, sane law isn't going to happen when the courageous person who stands up and says "This is unjust" gets locked up while a hundred guilty parties stand silent and afraid.
Sane law will only happen when a systematic change forces all 101 of them out into the light at the same time.
The population is in a divide and conquer type situation, afraid to be the first to say "There's nothing wrong with that. I do that, my friends do that, and we're all good people". But if the right approach were taken, they would all be revealed at once, be startled by the fact that they outnumber their persecutors, and make real change.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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
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