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A Surveillance Camera On Every Chicago Street Corner?
Mike writes "Chicago Mayor Daley has stated that if his Olympic dreams come true, by 2016 there will be a surveillance camera on 'every street corner in Chicago.' Just like in London, elected officials all over America appear to be happily advancing a 'surveillance society' without regard for civil rights or privacy concerns. Ray Orozco, executive director of Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications is quoted as saying, 'We're going to grow the system until we eventually cover one end of the city to the other.'"
Chicago has been developing its surveillance network for some time, but it seems they plan to continue increasing the scale.
Christ, they put those cameras in several years ago in the most high crime parts of Chicago. And you know what? They're still the most high crime parts of Chicago.
If you want crime to drop, give people a decent education, a decent job, and decent opportunity not to join a gang. And if you really want to increase enforcement, then stick a cop, not a camera, on every corner.
This is nothing more than "security theater" on a city-wide scale.
There is not a CCTV camera on every street in London.
But, who am I to burst your hyperbole bubble.
London has the highest density of CCTV cameras of any city in the world, and it's ridiculous overkill. Technically they may not be on EVERY street, but damn near close.
But more importantly, it's been shown as completely ineffective. Chicago is going to make the same mistake. Security theater..
As long as the system is open. Problem with digital evidence collected on such a wide basis, is the external view of you day can be selectively edited to present what ever they want to present and any information that may work in your defence is not made available. Where many elected officials are involved in the legal system and the pressure is on them to get convictions, whether the individuals involved are guilty or innocent, be very careful about how much additional power you give them.
If politician and law enforcement are so hot on surveillance lets start with them first. What would be wrong with a web cam in every politician's office monitoring their actions and accessible by the general public, after all they are meant to be working for the public so the public should be able to supervise them. The benefits of dash cam in police vehicles has been demonstrated, (although some thugs in uniform seem to develop a mental block and forget their actions are being recorded), so the system should be extended to a cap/hat/helmet cam, perhaps with a camera mounted to their head, they wont forget it is there and will adjust their behaviour accordingly.
You know the saying, who watches they watchers, everybody else. So before they start trying to surveil the public 24/7/365, let's test the system out on them first.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
London has the highest density of CCTV cameras of any city in the world, and it's ridiculous overkill. Technically they may not be on EVERY street, but damn near close.
But more importantly, it's been shown as completely ineffective. Chicago is going to make the same mistake. Security theater..
It hasn't managed to stop a single crime in London either.
I live in a UK town so small that the total population is less than a minor London borough, and we have camera's throughout the town centre, and along all major roads into and out of the town.
Most aren't watched, and the police have had zero luck using them to catch criminals, even when they rob several shops in a row at night.
Muggings? Hasn't stopped one.
There was a murder along one of these monitored streets, and the culprit has never been caught. All we got was wooden placards from the police asking if anyone had seen something.
The take home from this is that in the UK, cameras are put up to 'fit the mood' of the political times, but few councils have the money, or the will, to employ them on a day to day basis.
The government, in typical UK style, decreed that cameras would make use safer, but declined to provide sufficient funding. Any council that did nothing would have been deemed to be putting its people at risk, but if cameras were put up, but mostly unused, the blame could be placed on the governemtn again, for failing to provide the funding.
Its a farce. The loss to our freedom? negligable, barely noticable, if it exists at all. The loss to our pocket through wasted taxes? Millions, and thats far worse.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
It's OK. Here in Chicago, the surveillance cameras will be coin-op. You can pay your bribe up front, saving on manpower.
I'll say one thing for this idea: at least cctv cameras can't torture suspects*
(* for the full story. google "Chicago Police Torture".)
You are welcome on my lawn.
Sure, if no-one's watching (or there aren't enough people to watch effectively) then they're useless. If the video is so bad you can't see what's going on, they're useless.
BUT when the CCTV guys have a direct radio link to the police (and even better, local businesses too), when they have the staff to watch the cameras and catch people committing crime on video which conclusively shows them doing it, then the criminals are f**ed. The best lawyer in the world can't get you off when the police have video of you committing the crime. It also means the police don't even have to catch you doing it - they can walk past you an hour later in the street and slap the cuffs on before you know what's going on.
I would be wary of saying I'm pro-cctv, but with an effective police organisation behind it it's a very effective tool in the fight.
Case in point: The control guys spotted a gang of kids going into a shop, so they radio the shop security and tell them to stand back and just watch. Shop security backs off and watches them stealing stuff. CCTV tracks them out of that shop and into the next, same deal, kids are now getting well pleased with their haul, repeat for a few more shops then off to the bus station to catch the bus home with all their swag. As the bus pulls up, cops stroll out from three different directions and grab them, and all their gear, before they've even realised. No running, no chasing, no throwing the stash away, no arguing. In court, on video, case closed.
London's cameras have a good deal going on with car number plate recognition software, as soon as you drive a stolen/dodgy car into London it's just ticking down the minutes till a police car happens to appear from a side street and pull you over for a chat. No high-speed pursuit required.
There is no music - home taping killed it.
The correct use of those cameras is to wire them up to the Internet, and make it so that ANY concerned citizen can monitor the cameras in a Web browser, or perhaps a dedicated app. Leave it up to concerned citizens watching a camera to call the police and report what they have observed. Best of all, give them a tool - Firefox extension? - that lets them record what they're viewing, so they have some form of evidence to give police, not just hearsay.
In the United States we have Neighborhood Watch groups, many of which would no doubt find cameras on every street invaluable: they could sit home warm in their jammies and still help keep their neighborhood safe, instead of being out roaming the streets in the harsh cold with the crooks, risking being shot-at.
That approach would incur no additional municipal cost for monitoring, and any misuse of the cameras would be the responsibility of individual citizens, not Big Brother. Would citizens actually do it? I think they would, in high-crime areas or areas where crime is rising. That approach would be democratic, rather than autocratic.