'No more CCTV', cries top CCTV cop The man in charge of the Met's CCTV unit has criticised the way police use surveillance and called for no more cameras to be installed. Detective Chief Inspector Mike Neville said footage from cameras was often not used because forces do not have systems or staff to retrieve images. He added that serious crime that could be …
people try to defend themselves from the CCTV intrusion.
Some have taken axle grinders to them, glue guns are quite effective, and handheld catapults.
CCTV has made for more crime, it is a humanitarian crime in itself, and when people try to defend their rights it is another crime.
All of it is badly thought out, we should as a society be looking to bring the police force to zero and it doesn't help by making circular crime.
Maybe but has anyone considered that it is actually possible that the San Francisco Police Department don't own/control the CCTV cameras.
It might be, just a little pie in the sky thinking here, that the police departments job there is purely policing and not all and sundry tasks for whoever.
The authorities are not planning on installing more cameras anyway.
This publicity stunt was to make the public feel good that they're going to stop installing more cctv cameras and start training more people to watch the cameras instead, when this is exactly what they were planning to do all along.
Of course they have enough cameras now. But by saying "we wont install any more" they can fool people into feeling good about the small army of people that will now be drafted in to watch you on the cameras that they do have.
Install all the cameras you like I say, I think there should be a limit on the number of people who can be employed to watch the cameras. Lets say, one per million people.
Let that one person search through a million live feeds with no help from anyone else.
what? that's not a very effective way to spy on the public you say?
well of course not it's not supposed to be.
purely because there are so many. There's no way in hell anyone can actually effectively monitor them all in real time, if there were less of them i'd be far more concerned about the invasion of my privacy.
i'm not too bothered about somebody possibly getting hold of footage, after they've identified where i've been, identified any cameras that might have seen me, and then negotiated with all of the disparate owners to get hold of the tapes, as they already know what the tape will show or they wouldn;t be requesting it! Is it any wonder they are next to useless in solving crimes.
Then if there's a crime at my house I can review the footage for myself.
Better still, I can write some software that looks for people approaching my house which can then text me, or turn on the outside lights, or play the sound of a dog barking or turn on some inside lights to make it look like I'm at home.
Endless possibilities.
If you listen to the whole interview he isn't saying we have enough camera's or that we should never increase. He's just saying we have too many camera's for the resources available at the moment. We should stop for a while and plough that money into people, training, systems and procedures so that we can start making the most of the CCTV cameras we have today.
He didn't actually say it but it was implied that he would then be happy for the crappy, poor quality cameras to be replaced and for new, high-quality cameras to go up.
To suggest he was in some way anti-cameras or believed there were enough does not represent what I heard when I listened to the whole interview yesterday evening. He was quite clearly pro-cameras and believed there was an assumption amongst the public that, when crime takes place, someone will be watching on a CCTV camera and the perpetrators will subsequently be caught. He clearly believes the public backs ubiquitous CCTV.
He ISN'T saying we should cut the cameras. He's saying they can't be used to their full capability of minutely examining all of our lives at the moment, because the police need more staff.
So he's calling for MORE STAFF. He WANTS to cover the country with cameras, but he wants them all to be 100% effective. So, if anything, he's even worse than the people who just call for more rollout.
Once we get to his ideal state - 50% of people being employed watching the other 50%, you can bet he'll be crying out for more cameras somewhere.....
Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You are?
by THEODORE GEISSEL
(Dr. Suess) 1973
Oh, the jobs people work at!
Out west, near Hawtch-Hawtch,
there’s a Hawtch-Hawtcher Bee-Watcher.
His job is to watch…
is to keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee.
A bee that is watched will work harder, you see.
Well…he watched and he watched.
But, in spite of his watch,
that bee didn’t work any harder. Not mawtch.
So then somebody said,
“Our old bee-watching man
just isn’t bee-watching as hard as he can.
He ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher.
The thing that we need
is a Bee-Watcher-Watcher.”
WELL…
The Bee-Watcher Watcher watched the Bee-Watcher.
He didn’t watch well. So another Hawtch-Hawtcher
had to come in as a Watch-Watcher-Watcher.
And today all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch
are watching on Watch-Watcher-Watchering-Watch,
Watch-Watching the Watcher who’s watching that bee.
You’re not a Hawtch-Hawtcher. You’re lucky you see.
".. .. I'd tell you what I really think about cameras but there's one watching me just now."
we already know what u think .. saying it will only confirm our suspicions.
we ask 10 years m'Lord as he's clearly being thinking about us .. and he stared at us as futher proof of ( complete here).
Puddin Sarge
I was quite surprised at Mick's enthusiasm for CCTV. He was a mate of minefor a few years when we were both teenagers and if we had had significant amounts of surveillance back then things might have been a whole lot different. Then again you can be sure when he's opining on naughtiness he knows what he's talking about .
I would like another million cameras to go up over time. If I get mugged it would be nice to find out that there are plenty of cameras around that caught the incident with a good chance of catching the person in question (thugs don't tend to wear balaclavas all day long, and hoodies won't be so useful if there are plenty of cameras at lower angles).
I watched this interview last night, what the cop was actually suggesting is we ensure we're linking them together, using facial/numberplate recognition etc to get maximum value from the ones we have.
He wasn't suggesting we should never build CCTV again - well, it didn't sound like that was the case anyway. Just saying - don't jump up and down with glee too much.
Speaking as someone who has been mugged at knife point in an area liberally covered by CCTV in broad daylight by people not wearing anything to disguise their identity, I say tear all the cameras down and get coppers doing a proper job of patrolling. All that footage and no prosecution was brought, not even a suspect was identified, CCTV doesn't fucking work - the image quality is piss poor...
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