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Ever feel like you are being watched? In Britain, you probably are.
Both the Shetland Islands Council (101) and Corby Borough Council (90) – among the smallest local authorities in the UK – have more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department (71)
– BBC Report Pretty pictures here.
That’s nothing, it seems. We learn today that a single school in Stockwell, south London, has 96.
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Typical Wal-Mart stores have about 20 cameras watching the parking lot, and dozens of black globes (presumably cameras) inside. Easily 50 total.
The one I counted was in a small town in Virginia, NOT a high crime area.
Samsam
Nothing wrong with cameras in public spaces.
I hope they help reduce crime, and if so they’re welcome.
The interior of a public school is possibly the best place I can think of for State-run cameras.
I oppose a panopticon state, generally, but since we’re stuck with compulsory education at the moment for the vast majority of people, the utter lawlessness of many schools is worse than having cameras.
Such schools are immense hotbeds of assault and abuse (by “students”, mostly of “students”) – being able to catch the little bastards and prove it would be handy.
(Of course, the cheaper and better solution would be to either not have public schools or at least not force the troublemakers – who are plainly not interested in learning anything – to attend.)
‘Nothing wrong with cameras in public spaces.
I hope they help reduce crime, and if so they’re welcome.’
Wow. OK.
Who watches these recordings, how long are they kept and why, and what is all of this costing ??
If they help reduce crime ?? Surely you jest.
No proof of that anywhere.
The resolution stinks ( despite what you see in
movies ) and someone bent on robbery, murder etc. sure isn’t going to be stopped by having a grainy picture taken of them.
This ‘whole thing’ is to get people used to having NO privacy, and used to the potential of being ‘followed’ everywhere they go.
What are you going to say when they want to put one in your house ?? Just to keep you safe of course !!
Never happen you say ?? Look back 40 years, if you are old enough, and tell me what you would have said about losing your firearms, having to remove your shoes ( or far worse ) to get on a plane and on and on.
Chance are real good that you would have said, never happen.
Now tell me again how it will never happen that cameras get put in your home supposedly for your own safety !!
In my usual, perverse, way, I wonder whether ubiquitous camera are not actually a good thing – for larger libertarian goals, that is.
1. as there get to be more, and more, and more cameras, their actual usefulless in preventing crime will decrease, not increase – the sheer volume of data, and the ever-increasing number of ‘false positives’, will eventually overwhelm any response system. Plus, the citizens may finally twig to the fact that you can have cameras watching the cameras, with a camera watching them both, and crime is still not reduced, and they may actually come to question the efficacy of them at all.
2. The more cameras you have, the more they will be used. Not to prevent crime, of course, but for more-and-more of what we’re already seeing, where the police are despatched to question and harass people who are doing nothing wrong and nothing illegal. Or, as we also see more-and-more, for all sorts of activities having nothing to do with crime, ranging from quasi-official snooping of all sorts to simple old-fashioned voyeurism. Many of the publicly-owned cameras in the UK are already operated by entities other than the police, so the people looking at the screens aren’t even sworn officers but simply civil servants. And their buddies.
All these things have already happened – the more cameras you have, the more it will happen, and maybe perhaps to the point where the citizens say ‘enough’.
Even CCTV that watches for things and not people (eg license-plate recognition) is open to dreaful abuse – I can think of any number of situations where a record of a person’s movements (as indicated by his automobile) would be a tempting thing to take and use or sell. Tracking down the wife’s boyfriend? Easy. Finding out when the guy who lives in the big house with all the vallables is away from home? Piece of cake.
It’s a thought, anyway.
Here’s another thought (llamas knows a lot about imaging technology).
I’m guessing that most of these cameras are pretty MOTR technology, and therefore they are biased to the IR end of the spectrum.
So it would not be very hard to come up with (a device) that prevents the camera from identifying you but which is not remarkable to the normal naked-eye viewer. Maybe a device which produces a lot of infra-red, or which shifts spectral responses so as to break up identifiable shapes and colours. I’ll bet that, with the stuff laying around in my Secret Laboratory, and a ferw hours of experiment, I could come up with something that would render you effectively unwatchable on CCTV, but which would go unnoticed by the casual observer.
How much would you pay for such a device?
If it’s that simple (and I bet it is) why doesn’t every criminal have one?
Could it be that they don’t need one – because CCTV never poses a serious risk to them anyway?
If one were to make such a thing, and use it, I would bet that the time between you stepping out your front door and being accosted by the police could be measured with an egg-timer. You will have committed the offence of drawing the attention of a CCTV operator, with the implied assumption that anything that draws attention must be suspicious. Enough of that may persuade the average person that the game is not worth the candle.
I’m just sayin’.
llater,
llamas
In his fascinating book Future Imperfect, David Friedman discusses at length what he calls the “panopticon society”, mostly in negative terms. However, one observation he makes (which I believe he attributes to David Brin) is that ubiquitous cameras in public areas might be a good thing if they were available to all. In other words, not only could the police be viewing them, but the output would be freely available online for anyone else interested in watching, too. While the police were watching us, we would be (or at least could be, which is just as good) watching them. Might be fewer “Rodney King”-type episodes if that were the case.
That particular genie isn’t going back in the bottle any time soon. The rest of us might as well make some use of it.
The high number of cameras in Britain correlates with the high level of breakdown of the traditional ways of securing law and order. They are a sign of failure not success. They are of very limited, if any, value.
On arriving back in Britain after 20 years spent living abroad, there is almost a feeling of paranioa and Nanny Statedom in public places – particularly London. From the notices about “our staff have a right to work without being assaulted” in stations, to the public security announcements on trains, to the publicly-funded adverts about vans touring the country closing in on “TV licence evaders”….the cumulative effect is that “you, citizens, are all supected criminals and we are monitoring you ready to catch you stepping out of line and you will be punished”.
It’s small wonder that so many British people seem more anxious about so much than I ever remember when I last lived here.
British people once had a reputation for being polite. Whatever happened to that, or was it always a myth?
Gray,
That’s the point. That ‘notably polite’ stratum of the British demographic pyramid is now dying out, and being replaced by a demographic that is somewhat more feral and less polite.
The polite stratum wouldn’t want to make a fuss and complain, because, well, after all, the only people who have need to fear this kind of thing are the criminals. If you’ve done nothing wrong, what possible objection could you have, huh?
The feral stratum of course hangs a car tyre over the camera, fills the bottom with petrol and immolates the CCTV unit, if they can get to it. And frankly, in the case of that specific type of civic disobedience, I havs some sympathy with them
The evidence is that cameras in public places do not reduce crime, and that they very rarely assist in its detection. Stores do operate on the assumption they can curtail shoplifting, and I’m prepared to believe they have some effect in specific contexts.
But as David B points out, they also contribute to social anxiety – which many people misinterpret, assuming they will be comforted by more ‘security’, when the reverse is true.
However DavidB’s comment “the high level of breakdown of the traditional ways of securing law and order” contains two common unwarranted assumptions that play to the power of the panopticon: (1) that order is otherwise declining significantly, whereas in most places it isn’t, and (2) that traditional mechanisms of social control have been adventitiously eroded, perhaps overwhelmed by criminalty, where in fact they have been systematically destroyed as rivalling bureaucratic control.
llamas is quite correct that the availability of cameras has allowed police and other officials to use them more, to define new crimes and for their own purposes. Quiet police complaints about the ineffectiveness of cameras are not directed to stopping money being wasted on them, but to ‘upgrading’ them and placing them more under police control, even when they belong to someone else.
Llamas – I wouldn’t assume that the volume of information being generated by these cameras is going to become so great as to overwhelm response systems. I think the response systems are going to become much more sophisticated – look at the sort of information management technology being developed by the likes of Vialogy (www.vialogy.com).
My gut feel is with Guy, llamas, Laird, DavidB and doubtless many others, that CCTV and other forms of UK public surveillance are overdone on both cost-effectiveness and on undesirable intrusion.
However, gut feel apart, I’m unhappy with BBC article (and with Guy’s excerpt from it) on the grounds of their use of statistics. It’s highly likely that the UK use of cameras is much higher; that’s barely news; IIRC we know that from CCTV camera sales and population in each country. More troubling is the ‘shock/horror’ aspect: a little place has more cameras than somewhere vastly bigger. But the difference is exaggerated in the reports; that matters to some of us.
For such a statistical argument to be useful, the things compared must be fairly comparable. Selecting local councils in one case and police forces in another is not fairly comparable. The situation is made worse in that policy in the UK and USA may well differ, on who owns the cameras. A better comparison (though also lacking perfection) would be all cameras owned or leased by government and its agencies, per head of population; in fact the BBC does give per head of population figures for council CCTV in the the Shetlands and Corby (and they are high on that measure). And is San Francisco the highest user of CCTV in the USA? If not, surely it’s a bit off comparing the highest users in the UK against somewhere in the USA chosen for some other reason.
There is then the issue of demographic comparability. I’ve just looked at the Shetland Islands and San Francisco. The Shetland Islands have a land area of 566 square miles and a population of 22,000; that’s about 39 persons per square mile. San Francisco is more difficult to quantify, as there is the City and County (pop. 809,000) and the whole metropolitan area (pop. 7.4million). However, as the BBC’s quoted SFPD covers just the City and County (I wonder if they knew that, and if their readers do: I mean it’s only a factor of 9 in population). Let’s stick with the City and County: population of 809,000 and land area of 232 square miles: that’s 3,487 persons per square mile. Might not at least some of the difference (though I’m sure not all of it) be down to the relative efficiency of policing by men and by CCTV according to population density. Might not it have been better to compare locations in the UK and USA with a more similar demographic profile?
Thinks: statistics are only as good as what they really mean, unless you have a political agenda.
Best regards
CCTV on trains and in big stores is used at least as often to discipline the staff as it is to catch criminals.
They’ll play it back at the disciplinary hearing, and say something like “There! That is where you deviated from the procedure” or “That is where you should have walked away”, then they hand you your suspension.
The actual offenders, of course, are never caught. How could they be, when nobody knows who they are?
I wrote earlier:
Actually, and despite my noticing the land, water and total area, I then copied the wrong figure; the 232 square miles includes all the land (47 sq miles) and water (185 sq miles) allocated to the City and County. So it would be better for this to read:
Best regards
Maz wrote:
‘I think the response systems are going to become much more sophisticated – look at the sort of information management technology being developed by the likes of Vialogy (www.vialogy.com)’
While I absolutely agree with your observation that integrated information processing and management technologies are becoming very sophisticated indeed, and you provide an excellent example, I don’t think that this will help very much in the public safety/surveillance field. And I still believe that any public-safety response system will eventually be overwhelmed by any data-gathering system, no matter how sophisticated, for the simple reason that no data-gathering system yet conceeved – or even conceived-of – can divine intent.
Take my example. Say a person walking down the street pulls a LlamasSuit (pat. pending) out of his pocket and puts it on his – elbow. Let’s say it goes on his elbow. And, all of a sudden, his image is -unrecognizable, or altered – to the CCTV system and the data-gathering engine that feeds off it.
What’s he doing? Is it illegal? Is he simply tired of being tracked by the CCTV, or is he fixin’ to rob, that likker store? (thank you, George).
A human operator might be able to divine his intent. A data-analysis engine won’t be able to. But, either way, what are you going to do? Odds are, you’ll despatch a human officer. No human operator will ever be fired for erring on the side of caution, and any data-analysis engine that replaces or supplements a human operator will be calibrated the same way.
Date-gathering and analysis tools of the type you describe work surprisingly-well when intent and motivation are quite clear. It is safe to assume, for example, that prisoners who do things outside the realm of their prescribed and proscribed regimen are trying to escape, and the patterns of such behaviour are remarkably-easy to map and C&C. But people walking down the street are another matter – they can do a million things which may, or may not, be the result of bad intent, or which may be entirely innocent.
I am sure that regular contributor Sunfish will be happy to describe a dozen events in which criminal behaviour was entirely unapparent until the moment that the dynamite went off – also a dozen more in which he rolled up on what looked like a mass-homicide-in-progress, only to find that it was – something else entirely.
In the last week.
llater,
llamas
Unfortunately this is how Chicago is getting.
As a Northamptonshire man I can tell you that Corby council has the reputation of being the most corrupt council in the county.
Perhaps those CCTV systems should be watching the members and officers of the council (and the M.P. for Corby and “Minister for the East Midlands” Philip Hope) rather than ordinary people.
However, the rulers prefer that the ruled are watched.
After a party I had to identify two of my friends having sex in a back room of the club from CCTV images from a camera in the room. The resolution was awful and the recording jumpy, so despite knowing everyone at the party well, I couldn’t identify either of them. How is anyone going to identify a random member of the public?