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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.
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
Wasn't a major point of 1984 that only a tiny amount of unusually sensitive people would recognize a totalitarian state for what it is? There was no hope in the proles in Orwell's future England because their lives were just as miserable before as after and they didn't have time to ruminate on things like Winston Smith and Julia. When Smith tried to ask an old man about former days, he couldn't seem to make any argument against the current state of things. Thanks to Smith's own work in the Ministry of Truth, the population couldn't actually read about how bad things really were.
In this instance, I agree England is not yet an Orwellian dystopia. However, dystopias have a way of establishing themselves without many noticing.
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.
Well said sir. And, as the article explains -- far more even handedly than slashdot's biased summary -- the reason that CCTV footage doesn't help solve crimes is because no-one ever looks at it.
Yes folks, slashdot's latest evidence that the UK is a surveillance society is a report that states that no-one ever looks at the CCTV footage. But our summarisers have never let the facts get in the way of a good knee jerk.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
Or perhaps you are basing your comment on the headline from a year or two ago that took the number of security cameras (including private ones) per mile on the busiest shopping street in the UK and multiplied it by the number of miles of roads in the UK?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes folks, slashdot's latest evidence that the UK is a surveillance society is a report that states that no-one ever looks at the CCTV footage
Don't forget that the oft-reported massive figure for the number of CCTV cameras in the UK is *completely made up*. It's a fake figure. It was concocted by looking at the number of CCTV cameras on a section of the main street of a particularly rough part of London which was deliberately chosen because of the high numbers of CCTV cameras covering things like pawn shops, bookies, off-licences and cheque-cashing shops. Then this already artificially high figure was scaled up by multiplying by the amount of road in the whole of the UK. So, the number would be accurate if *every inch* of the UK's roads was like the middle of a particularly shitey area of London.
It's not, though.
Did you know that in the US, because it's legal for people to walk around with guns, *every single American* is robbed at gunpoint *every day*? No, you didn't did you? But it's true! It said so on the Internet!
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.
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!)