Cameras and Crime

There is an ongoing debate about the placement of police cameras in my old town of Brookline MA, and in other cities as well. The issues are public safety and privacy. There is also a question of how effective cameras are. I find myself agreeing more and more with the public safety advocates, and am finding the privacy position less and less strong. First and foremost, to put it bluntly:

Get over yourself!

Nobody is monitoring your activities. Nobody is following you about town via camera. Frankly, nobody gives a **** what you are up to. You think there is some officer assigned to you in a room somewhere writing reports to The Central Authority? Logging your whereabouts and activities?

7:52pm - Subject leaves apartment
7:59pm - Enters Whole Foods
8:15pm - Emerges with roast chicken and tube of toothpaste

Give me a break. You are not that important.

London has a million cameras. Do you think they are all monitored? Of course not. In fact, the more cameras they add, the more privacy their citizens are likely to have. Tapes from cameras are only looked at when there has been a serious crime committed. Note that the article above states that only one crime was solved by each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year. But this may simply mean that most crimes are easily solved, or that petty crime does not warrant the cost of looking through the tapes. What about serious crime? The report says an estimated "70% of murder investigations have been solved with the help of CCTV retrievals and most serious crime investigations have a CCTV investigation strategy." That is a spectacularly high percentage, in my opinion. Note also that evidence regarding two recent serious sexual assaults in Brookline was in fact caught on tape.

Sure, police may catch criminals even without video tape, but that is not the whole story. There is also the trial phase. A tape showing the criminal at the scene of the crime at a specific time is great evidence for a prosecutor to have. And doesn't having videotape decrease the likelihood of a false identification? If I were accused of a crime I didn't commit, I would be praying to God that there were police cameras rolling near the scene.

Oddly, the privacy advocates don't seem to have many specifics of just how cameras violate their privacy. Can this be explained a bit better? If one is in a public place, how much privacy should one expect? If I set up a webcam and point it out the window, am I violating your privacy? Isn't there some way to ensure that government acquired tapes are not available without a court order? I wouldn't have any objection to that. But I don't get the objection to the whole concept of cameras in public places.

As a side note, I suspect my opinion here has changed over time. Previously I might have been more of a Libertarian idealist and an opponent of a Snooping State. I would say I have... "matured."

Ann says: My biggest objection would be the level of staffing to maintain and watch the cameras. Does it mean creating an army of camera-watchers who spend time flicking between screens looking for something. If it is mostly-automated and requires little staffing, that's not so bad. A big camera-bureaucracy, I can do without!

Yes, I agree. I can't believe there is an army of humans looking through 1 million cameras in London. The cost is another issue, and a good one.