Big Brother is chicken, cameras can be a cop-out
It’s time to have a discussion about law enforcement. What is law enforcement exactly? It used to be “feet on the street”. Today it is all about cameras from above and Mayors Against Guns.
The pinnacle of the new form of law enforcement is London, England. No guns, no knives, no cops. A shinning Utopia for the whole World to model itself after.
Of course what London has become is a Shangri-La for criminals, who have guns, knives, and sadly no cops. And they are not camera shy.
Of course there is no way that could happen in America, right? Wrong. In fact in Aberdeen, Maryland, 30 miles northeast of Baltimore, the City Council adds insult to injury by forcing the building owners to buy the cameras that allow the police to stay away. The cameras are connected to the police station where they are monitored, by you guessed it, cops.
But, on the flip side of the coin, Mayor S. Fred Simmons is an advocate for the right of private citizens to carry defensive sidearms. He should be. If you are going the camera route instead of “feet on the street” the people should have the right to carry a weapon. Bullets travel faster than police cars. Time will tell if the people receive from their government the right to protect themselves.
Orwell never foresaw this type of Big Brother.
The ordinance
Aberdeen Ordinance No. 731-06: Surveillance Cameras:
Provisions for security cameras shall be installed at strategic locations in all commercial and industrial developments and in any residential developments deemed appropriate by the Aberdeen Police Department and Department of Planning and Community Development. Coordination between the Aberdeen Police Department, Department of Public Works and the property owner will be required prior to the approval of any development permits.
October 8th, 2007 at 11:15 am
What am I doing wrong? Fucking spammers.
October 8th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Didn’t Orwell’s 1984 have video cameras everywhere, including the peoples’ rooms? I think he did foresee this…
October 8th, 2007 at 11:26 am
When you “grow” a government and bureacracy until it becomes a more corporate model in place of a Constitutional model, you get stuff like this all the time. The trend is toward more of these kinds of decisions, not less.
It’s a big trend too, by the way.
October 8th, 2007 at 11:48 am
Idiotic.
Other places have tried that sorta system. Ground-based cameras just aren’t viable for any wide area surveillance system. We don’t have the computing power necessary to track a single person from camera to camera live today. Even after a few cycles of Moore’s law, we won’t. Even once we do, presenting that sorta information to a jury would be nearly impossible. Even once we can process the information, you’d literally have to cover every nook and cranny to have a chance in hell of catching criminals — these people, by definition, are not going to ignore cameras — and present a jumble of poorly framed movies to a jury.
October 8th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Have to wonder how long until these cameras become targets of choice for paintball punks.
October 8th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Seems to me……That our gonvernment is becomming more and more like a country that we fought a war aginst and won so we could be free of this kind of thing.
October 8th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
My Big Brother point was that in some places with cameras you are less likely to have live policemen walking a beat. The cameras allow the police not to be police but to watch on TV.
In London there are speakers on the cameras and the cops yell out, “Leave that women alone.” Of course they are ten minutes away so the criminals aren’t concerned. Ironically the Hollywood types like Gwyneth Paltrow move to London for safety. Idiots.
The worst of all worlds is to disarm the public, put up cameras, and then have the police hide at the police station. That seems the opposite of what Orwell foresaw.
Don’t fear the totalitarians, fear the bureaucrats.