After reading Natalie Solent’s article called A law-abiding person has nothing to hide?, reader Matt Judson wrote in with this cautionary tale as a case in point. The camera does indeed lie.
I have read with interest your posts on security cameras, and the threat they represent. I was especially interested in your post on the idea that law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from security cameras and other surveillance technology, because I was recently unjustly accused of vandalism due to security video.
I recently moved to Nob Hill in San Francisco. Nob Hill is justly famous for the lack of parking; After a few weeks of struggle, I surrendered, and chose to pay $255 per month to park in the Masonic Garage.
Purely by coincidence, my friend works in IT for the Masonic Center of San Francisco, which oversees the garage. Friday morning, he sent me an email: “Emergency: call me now! This is not a joke.” I called him, and he told me that the garage manager had asked for his help in emailing security camera video. The garage had caught someone keying a car on camera; they identified the suspect because he drove off a few minutes later, and they had his license plate number. They wanted to send the video to the owner of the car, so that the owner could take it to the police and file charges.
When he looked at the video, he was shocked to see that I was the suspect on the video. He did not think that I was the kind of person who would vandalize a car, but he thought I looked very suspicious on the tape. If he had not known me, he would have sent the video off without a second thought.
I told my friend that I have never keyed a car in my life. That was me on the tape, no question. I knew what I was doing when I was on the camera: I checked for my car on one level, but did not see it; I then turned around, thought about heading for the stairway, and then decided to take the elevator to the next level. I did all of this next to the car that had been vandalized.
At lunchtime, I went to the garage to speak to the garage manager. I told him that it was not me, and asked him to review the tape carefully. He replied that the garage had already reviewed the tape carefully, and they were convinced that they had the right person. He suggested that I call the car owner and try to work out a deal so that I would not be charged.
My friend believed me, and spent the rest of the day reviewing video. Two days after I was caught on video, he found video of a group of teenagers doing something to the car in question; when the teenagers noticed the security camera, they covered their faces and ran away. My friend took the video to the manager, and forced him to call me to apologize. His apology was grudging, of course: “Your friend found someone who was maybe more suspicious than you were.”
If it had not been for an incredible stroke of luck, I would have been in for a major headache, perhaps charged with a crime. The initial reviewers of the video tape were completely untrained in viewing video; they did not bother to review the tape carefully; the way they passed on their suspicions resulted in a psychological set that I was guilty; if I had not had a close friend in the process, it would have been very hard to convince anyone of my innocence. Lastly, the garage was going to pass the video on to the owner of the car without telling me; if the car owner had seen me in the garage and recognized me from he video, what would he have done?
Law-abiding people do indeed have something to fear from security cameras.
Matt Judson, San Francisco
I once received a traffic ticket from a police officer while on the way to get more paint to finish painting a bedroom. ( I was rather scruffy at the time.)
When I showed up in court to protest the ticket, I was wearing a suit and tie.
The cop took one look at me and said, “You ain’t the guy!”
I ended up beating the ticket, because the cop had written down a non-existant intersection as the location.
Moral: Even “trained” observers get it wrong.
How is this any different from “Joe over here thought he saw you do it”? Except that, with the tape, Matt was actually able to prove his innocence!
Seems that it’s not the CCTV cameras that are the problem, it’s amateur law-enforcement types interpreting them and acting on what they think they see as though it was proof positive. Vandalism reports ought to be handled by police investigators trained in that sort of thing, not by premature, second-hand reports from garage owners. Not that the police are perfect or without their own failings, but they’re at least aquainted with how things ought to be done.
It’s my opinion cameras are a substantial part of the problem, because they reduce the amount of intelligent interpretation of the evidence that is required. ‘The camera never lies’ remember, something we all know to be false, presumably the CCTV camera never lies and an official ID card also never lies.
These devices give the opportunity to turn away from other lines of inquiry, to take an easy route and that’s as true of the police as anyone else.
Your word against someone elses is inconclusive, your word against CCTV footage? I wouldn’t give you any chance at all in front of a jury.
JayN has it exactly right. Technical fixes lull people into lazy thinking. The real issue is still “can the witness be certain?” and, like ID cards, the effect can even be to increase crime, because people believe in the machinery instead of using their common sense.
Julian Morrison has it backwards of course – you shouldn’t have to prove your innocence (ID cards are also a ruse by governments to train us into thinking we are guilty until we prove ourselves innocent).
You are innocent until proven guilty, and the fact that this primitive piece of gadgetry had Matt Judson scrambling to prove his innocence, instead of the other way round, shows us immediately something very serious has gone wrong.
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I like the idea of using CCTV for surveillance as a deterrent and as a low cost monitoring solution. However, I do believe that operators should achieve a minimum proficiency and make a commitment to only use video footage in a fair and responsible way. That said, there are no such requirements for gun ownership or raising children so why start with CCTV? Ultimately, we would hope that our fellow citizen operators would properly scrutinize video evidence before taking action. We would especially hope that law enforcement organizations would posses the necessary proficiency and discipline to ensure that video footage is used in a fair and impartial way.
What really freaks me out about Matt’s situation is how it all perpetuated despite the following:
1. the victim filed a report with inaccurate details that nobody questioned
2. the original reviewer of video footage had no previous experience
3. only 1 hour of footage was originally reviewed even though there were over 130 hours footage during which the crime could have taken place
I think that Matt’s situation escalated the way it did because we live in a television society and if we see one good bit of video footage, we assume it is reality. On the day in question, it was like they were acting out a scene from the movie “Hang ’em High”.