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In NJ, Higher Tech Lowers Crime
crimeandpunishment sends along this snip from an AP story carried on Skunkpost.com: "High tech means low crime in a New Jersey city that has used an arsenal of advanced technology to sharply lower one of the highest crime rates in the nation. And now East Orange is poised to become the first city in the country to take high tech crime fighting to a whole new level ... surveillance cameras with sensors that can be programmed to identify crimes as they unfold."
A the most watched nation on earth, we're familiar with this path in the UK. Expect issues, as seen at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/17/birmingham-stops-spy-cameras-project
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/06/ukcrime1
Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
As if all the wrongs of mankind can be layed at the feet of religion.
As if, if there were godless people, they wouldn't just find another belief system or philosophy to justify doing the same things.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Mankind made religion; differentiating between what we made and what we made of what we made isn't terribly relevant.
Surveillance is not the only way to fight crime. In fact, London has shown that it even isn't especially effective.
And while the whole NJ murder rate have dropped nearly 25%, that wasn't due to CCTVs, but by "conducting intelligence-led, high-impact investigations targeting the command structures".
Yes, not only I can be spied by the cops, but by everyone else!
By the way, maybe having "about 15.9% of families and 19.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 24.7% of those under age 18" is a good reason for the high crime rates. It's better to attack the causes instead of the consequences.
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As this system leaves in the human factor for actually deciding if an action is necessary (ie: sending cops), and then leaves the cops deciding what actions to take, it doesnt seem any more open for abuse than the current surveillance system in place.
Except that you left something out, the system is partially paid for with forfeitures. The more forfeiture the bigger the system can be made. We've already been having problems with law enforcement forfeitures. "For example, between 1989 and 1992, the Sheriff's Office in Volusia County, Florida, seized $8 million in cash in roadside stops of motorists. Although the office returned about half of the money in settlements, it still retained $4 million over the three-year period." Today Texas police seize black motorists' cash, cars. Or Asset Forfeiture: Austin Police Use of Seized Funds Probed. Law enforcement makes a lot of money from forfeitures.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The statistics are even worse than those figures imply. According to stats recently released by London, the surveillance camera capital of the world (I did not find the article, but it was just a couple of months ago), the number of crimes solved using cameras equated to one crime annually per 1,000 cameras. Note that does not even specify "major" crimes, just crimes. It is likely that the average crime solved saved less money than that single camera and the person or people required to staff it cost, and that doesn't even count the other 999.
MAYBE this system is different. But if it's like many of the other "high-tech" systems that have been tried in recent years, if I were them I would be awfully cautious. As the guy in TFA said, it is very likely that if the system is sensitive enough to actually detect crimes, there will also be so many false positives as to render it useless.