Councils Recruit Unpaid Volunteers To Spy On Their Neighbors

Several readers have written to tell us that a recent move in the UK has councils relying on info from "Citizen Snoopers" to report the transgressions of their neighbors. Currently only implemented as "environment volunteers" designed to keep watch on things like litter, dog habits, and improper trash sorting, there is a certain amount of trepidation that this could grow into something more sinister. "It will fuel fears that Britain is lurching towards a Big Brother society, following the revelation this week that the Home Office is extending some police powers to council staff and private security guards. Critics said the latest scheme could easily be abused and encourage a culture of bin spies and curtain twitchers. Matthew Elliott, of the Taxpayers' Alliance, said: 'Snooping on your neighbors to report recycling infringements sounds like something straight out of the East German Stasi's copybook.'"

Comments

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[Anonymous Coward]

Queue slashdot apologists.

Re:Police don't do anything

[Viol8]

"So I bought a top of the line camera ($2500) to catch the action and turn it into the police."

You're braver than I would be. The crims only have to spot you taking their picture or one of the "friends" in the police let them know who took it and you and your house will be getting more attention than is healthy.

Re:In Communist Britain?

[TheRaven64]

This is Slashdot. Fascist usually means totalitarian here. Communism means anything from expecting some form of society to exist (rather than a total free-for-all where the strongest man wins) to totalitarianism with a planned economy.

Re:And this won't be missused...

[Das Modell]

Because of what a small minority have done, you mean?

It's not a small minority. Not by a long shot.

Do you hate the irish? What makes this situation any different to the times the IRA were active?

Lots of things, like the fact that the IRA was not embarking on an eternal, God-given religious quest to rid the world of infidels one way or another. The IRA was a small, temporal group with small, temporal objectives, not an entire religious culture over 1500 years old with members in every corner of the planet.

Oh indeed, that's true. Just like whether the UK is being islamicized or not is also irrelevant to the perceptions of reactionaries and racists. May I ask why you believe that the UK is being islamicized?

There's really no point in even talking about this. All the king's men and all the king's horses could never convince you that anything is amiss in Britain or Europe. Go back to sleep.

I don't even understand this term you're using. What do you mean by cultural suicide?

A culture loses its will to live and descends into apathy, nihilism and decadence, a condition which can only end in tears.

Re:Its cut price police - again

[Duncan Blackthorne]

I see something like this in a different light. I see it as a government encouraging some of the worst traits that human beings have to offer, and no good will come of it. Even if I try to spin it in a positive direction, the fact of the matter is that they're going to be considering untrained average people as trusted authority figures, automatically giving creedence to whatever they're reporting. Nice on paper -- just like communism is "nice on paper", and how capitalism is "nice on paper". The sad reality of human beings is that it'll end up being used as a tool by these chosen informants against neighbors they don't like, or to further other personal agendas. It's bad enough that actual police, screened and trained, still can suffer from these same shortcomings, with average people in the mix, there'll be witch-hunts going on all over the place. It's bad enough that the UK government has wasted so much money planting CCTV cameras all over the place with little to no effect, now they're going to make up for the budgetary loss this way, simultaneously making the situation worse.