CCTV and Policing

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6673579.stm

'A senior police officer has said he fears the spread of CCTV cameras is leading to "an Orwellian situation". Deputy chief constable of Hampshire Ian Readhead said Britain could become a surveillance society with cameras on every street corner. He told the BBC's Politics Show that CCTV was being used in small towns and villages where crime rates were low. Mr Readhead also called for the retention of some DNA evidence and the use of speed cameras to be reviewed.'

At last. I can now detect an upswell of public concern, reaching it now seems even the higher-ups in the Police, about our spied-upon society. It struck me with great force when I came back to Britain from the US how wide-spread CCTV was already in 1989, and how completely normal people felt it was. Over and and over again, I heard the same argument "Have you got something to hide? What are you doing that you don't want the cameras to see?". This makes precisely the point about why CCTV is bad. It assumes that we are doing bad things, and will wait patiently for us to do them. The presumption of guilt is now universal.

The way I see it is this: back when Policemen had a beat, and walked around the neighborhood, a great amount of petty crime was detected and/or prevented. As the 'Broken Window' theory of crime tells us, petty crime breeds hard-core crime. Once the Policemen retreated from the front lines into cars, petty criminals were free to engage in as much crime as they felt like, with very little chance of detection. This spawned a vast new generation of petty criminals who mostly got away with it. The Police were either in their stations or their cars, and simply became a fire-fighting force responding only to the most dramatic and lethal crimes. Everything else, especially crimes against property, went unsolved and often un-reported. A gulf of resentment and alienation grew up between the Police and the communities they nominally 'protected'. The streets became the de facto domain of the bully, the thug and the street gang. When a policeman was spotted it was a fleeting glimpse of him/her racing past on the way to a 'real' crime.

So local authorities filled the 'Policeman' gap with CCTV. They were the new 'beat' officers. They were the eyes on the street, awake 24 hours and no overtime bills. Well, that was the story we were told anyway. It hasn't turned out like that. As soon as the criminals worked out that CCTV is very easy to fool, CCTV's usefulness virtually ceased. The hoodie arrived. If you are wearing a hoodie and a baseball cap, CCTV can't tell who you are. So the hoodie is everywhere, as is the baseball cap. The 'Continuity IRA' man who left the taxi bomb in front of BBC television centre was caught on CCTV- sadly, as he had a baseball cap on and his collar turned up, he could have been Tony Blair or the Pope. CCTV doesn't catch criminals- it catches you and I going about our daily business watching in case we park outside the lines, jaywalk or litter.

What Britain needs is Policemen. Enough of them to patrol (on foot or bicycle) 60 million people. They should be armed, wear bullet-proof vests and tasked with retaking the streets from the drug-dealers, hoodie-gangs and feral kids. They should be equipped with cameras and microphones to record their encounters, so they don't have to write copious reports, and the form-filling that now fills their days eliminated wholesale. A policeman should primarily be a public defender, not an adjunct of the CPS. That balance must be changed. Also, the laws of Britain need to be changed so that Policemen can again do their jobs without the constant fear of ambulance-chasing lawyers.

We are constantly told that old-fashioned policing has been replaced by super-duper scientifically-proven strategic intelligence-driven policing. Bollocks. Old-fashioned policing has been replaced by CCTV cameras, while the Police spend most of their time doing paperwork and processing the few criminals who are unfortunate enough to be tracked down after the fact. But you can only do old-fashioned policing if there are enough officers to cover all the beats. New York increased its police ranks by about a third, and crime rates fell by 80%. But it cost a lot of money. Do New Yorkers think it was worth it? Hell yeah. Would it work in Britain?