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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."
What we really need in NJ are cameras that can be programmed to identify political corruption as it unfolds. Oh wait, we already have them, they're called 'regular cameras pointed at our politicians'.
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
[citation needed]
This is clearly a well thought-out plan. Why, what could possibly go wrong?
In this day and age, it doesnt really matter how well thought out such a plan is when it involves information or people. There are always those who have the ability to and will abuse any system. Does that mean we should stop all innovation because of those who will abuse them? Or that instead we should weigh the potential for abuse against the potential for good in determining what to do with such ideas? Or plan in as many safety measures and punishments as possible to prevent abuse?
I know your (possibly rhetorical) question is the expected slashdot normal obligatory response for such things, but on the other hand, there has been quite a bit of innovation and ideas that have been fought every step of the way because of such opinions, dogma and other factors. 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. Now... if the system sent automated drones out to deal with everything it thought was a crime... that would be a different story. But fortunately, we are probably still a long way away from such technology - much less the application of such technology even if it did exist.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
From TFA:
The results have been startling: Violent crime in East Orange has fallen by more than two-thirds since 2003, according to state police statistics.
...
Jose Cordero was hired as East Orange's police director in 2004 after overseeing the New York Police Department's anti-gang efforts. Crime in East Orange had dropped off after the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 90s but then rose dramatically in the early 2000s as gangs began to put down roots.
It seems more likely to me that Cordero himself is the reason for falling crime rate rather than any high tech stuff (which just tends to move crime to other locations). I'm suspicious because, for example, in the UK where there is massive investment in surveillance cameras, my understanding is that they have found that they are mainly useful for providing evidence for prosecuting the criminals after the fact, and even that is only in something less than 25% of the cases.
Besides the oft-quoted Ben Franklin line, I do believe giving a government too much power in watching the populace is dangerous for liberty. Should the legitimate need arise to break a law or subvert the government, corrupt individuals will have power to stop people even more easily.
On the fliip side, the ubiquity of increased surveillance available to the PUBLIC as well as to the government (they are two different things) might prevent the government from getting away with the shit it does now.
I have to throw in a quote: "With great power comes great responsibillity." I don't think the government has enough of the latter to justify the amount of the former it possesses.
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
So I lived in the mission area of SF for a while earlier this year. This place was bad - post the 21st street or so. A friend of mine was mugged & beaten badly at 24th and Mission (where Bart is) at 9 in the evening.
Last year they started installing cameras all around (very visible effort - you could see cameras all around you) - and the crime rate (atleast the mugging rate) went down immediately. Everyone here agrees that the drop in crime can be attributed to the street cameras. This opinion is also shared by business & hotel owners whom I know and meet.
I do think nothing can improve Tenderloin though.
detection != prevention
They are actually charging users with much higher crimes by adding up all of their purchases. I've had friends that have been charged with their entire years worth of purchases in a single case.
Rather than charging on a single offense for purchasing a small quantity of heroin in Jersey City. They are waiting until the charge can be trumped up to 6 months of their use. So instead of being charged with purchasing a single gram (bundle)... they are being charged with purchasing 400grams over the course of 6 months to a year, bringing long prison sentences to habitual users.
The high charges are definitely a deterrent for users, though I hardly think these charges are justified.
The irony is that Christians, which Miriam represented in the game, have inflicted a terrible, awful false god upon the West for the last two millennia.
All gods are false, and the sooner we do away with them as anything other than myths the better.
There are levels of the assumption of privacy. On a public street I expect that anything I do might be photographed, but I don't expect that any party is keeping an extensive enough set of recordings of me to plot all my movements and my daily activities.
Even though photography in public in general is legal and violates no rights, it's unclear whether a systematic campaign to photograph such a huge swath of someone's activities that you can extract overall patterns of behavior does. If a private person did this they might be prosecuted (rightfully so) for stalking.
The incarceration rate is more important to me than the "crime rate." Are there more people in prison as a result of the high technology, or are less people in prison? Just because we become more efficient at catching criminals it doesn't mean society is safer, it all depends on what we consider to be a crime at the time and how we sentence it. The technology doesn't really help one way or the other unless we have sane laws.
We don't need to look for ways on how this could go wrong - the constant surveillance is wrong by itself.
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Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Lowering the violence rate, lowering specific types of crime which have victims may make us safer. Lowering the "crime rate." usually raises the incarceration rate which often lowers the income of families making them even more desperate and likely to commit crimes in the future.
Lowering the crime rate is a way to increase the incarceration rate and win political points. It's not going to make anyone safer to for example make massive arrests of drug possession, or to arrest thousands of prostitutes, but thats usually the kind of crime they go after because it's easier. They'll probably go arrest a bunch of small time pot dealers, and crackheads, maybe some prostitutes, and say they lowered the crime rate in the city.
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
Can't wait until the next time I am in New Jersey and do the "did I forget my wallet in my car?" pat-down in public, I will probably be sitting in the county jail overnight on suspicion of mugging.
I'm glad to see someone throwing out an out-of-the-box idea on how to prevent or neutralize crimes before they actually happen, but now instead of dealing with a crime after it's been committed, you get to watch it unfold while it's happening. Perhaps a bit more video evidence to look at on law enforcements side, but what does this do for Joe Americana and their privacy rights? You know this network is going to get used for more than it's initial intention. Unfortunately, bad apples spoil the whole pie sometimes and no one wins.
How do you detect a gun shot cheaply and with triangulation?
Could it be via a cheap device called a microphone? Strange how its now "gunshot detection" like its some optical device.
If they can listen for gun shots, they can listen for voices and create a nice 'part time' state voice print database.
Welcome back to COINTELPRO version 2.0 down every large street.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I'm sorry, but I completely disagree with your sentiment. If there was a problem with your line that caused a 911 call to be made, you cannot fault the police with following protocol. How can they know that it was a problem with your line that caused the call to take place? How are they to know that you didn't do something to your girlfriend that caused her to call 911, only for you to hang up the phone before she could do or say anything? In that case, it is perfectly logical that they would conduct a search of your apartment in order to ensure that you didn't do something further to her because she tried to call for help.
I mean, why should the police believe you that there was nothing wrong? Because you said so? Sorry, not a good enough reason. Had something actually happened, and they simply left because you said there was some kind of mistake, and a body was later found, the public outcry would have been enormous.
The police just can't win. We expect them to do their jobs, but when they do do their jobs, people get angry because they might be a bit inconvenienced. I just don't understand it.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
I am an SVU cop posting to Slashdot from work right now. I am currently recording a man raping a woman in a dark alley. This is his fifth victim that we know of. We're not going to move in until he's gotten to 20, or until he stops.
Seems that the appropriate response would have depended entirely on the contents of the 911 call. If there was specific, actionable information in the 911 call, then that would be one thing. If the caller said "Help me, my boyfriend is beating me and I can't get away." it seems reasonable to enter without the owner's permission. If the call was simply a hang up, or a call for a non-criminal emergency, then there should be no reason for the police to enter without permission. In many places, 911 calls are a matter of public record. Seems like it would be reasonable for the GP to find out exactly the contents of the call. If the police were unreasonable or acting outside of policy, then it would be reasonable to complain, and seek appropriate restitution.
As a criminologist I have to say this interpretation of the relationship between crime and incarceration is... well... not supported by the evidence. The relationship between incarceration rates and crime rates is loose at best and this has been demonstrated both in cross national studies and in longitudinal studies of the United States and other western nations. For example, in the United States incarceration rates have risen dramatically and consistently in the last 40 years while crime rates have fluctuated considerably. The factor that has the biggest impact on the incarceration rate is actually changes in sentencing strategies. Changes in sentencing strategies are often only loosely related to crime rates, if at all, however.
Mankind made religion; differentiating between what we made and what we made of what we made isn't terribly relevant.
Whether a lowering of the crime rate corresponds to an increase in safety depends on which crimes are being reduced, of course, but typically a reduction in crime rate corresponds to a reduction in violent and property crimes.
Now, padding arrest rates with drug possession/prostitution arrests may be political posturing, but arrest rate is not the same as crime rate.
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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Unfortunately the evidence doesn't support your hypothesis: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article571206.ece
How about we try teaching people to be rational whilst supplying them with good reasons to behave - that seems logical to me.
No problem. If it violates our rights, it'll recognize that as a crime in progress, and turn itself off.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
The most atheistic nations today have the highest suicide rates (these are those enlightened nations always mentioned here as being so wonderful..we all know which ones those are). They may have a lot of material wealth, but have little regard for anything else, mass alcoholism and drug addiction is the norm in those nations, and has been steadily rising year after year over the last several decades now.
Citation needed -- if you're not even going to name the countries, you don't have much credibility. Also, have you estimated the size of the systematic error due to reporting differences? If you're going to wave your hands and invoke statistics you'd better have some numbers to back them up.
The largest mass murders in the 20th century were done by the officially atheistic and socialist/communist/collectivist nations (USSR, China, Nazi era Germany, and today North Korea, by far the most oppressive regime on the planet).
Did I say that atheists were always perfect? Besides, Hitler's regime wasn't adverse to religion; he alternatively used Christianity and Germanic neopaganism for his own ends.
Your examples would be more meaningful if three of the four weren't Communist, which just happens to combine state atheism with state repression.
And these Communist regimes replace loyalty to a false religious ideology with unblinking loyalty to the Party, which is just as bad in exactly the same way.
In your list of repressive regimes, you forgot Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the various Southeast Asian military dictatorships, fyi.
Your metrics, the ones you insist make you "superior", leave a lot to be desired when you leave out and dismiss as so trivial to not mention, the mass murder of close to 200 million people, and the mass unhappiness that comes from pure empty materialistic life.
"Materialism" means two things. There's the philosophical idea that the material world is all that there is, and that's not "empty". (I study that material world as a particle physicist, and it's very complex and beautiful.)
Then there's the common use to mean "obsession with material things"... and that has nothing to do with atheism; actually, most of the atheists I know are less concerned with possessions than the average religious person.
Atheism in and by itself is not any sort of "cure" for mass assholeness.
No, it's not. It's prevention, in the long term: in a rational world, assholes are more quickly called out and shouted down.
...that 25years ago, we all saw that the surveillance states of the Eastern block were an abomination not worthy of a free society...
Now, we create surveillance society V2.0 here in the west...