John Mortell’s blog :: 2009

Why more CCTV camera’s don’t mean you’re safer

A while back I (like many others) was quite interested to hear that CCTV camera’s were not useful in solving crimes. But at the time, I had some people say to me that while they may not be great, they made people feel more secure. This post from the Adam Smith Institute seems to undercut that argument:

the rapid spread of CCTV cameras has gone hand in hand with a massive increase in crime, particularly violent crime. People demand CCTV because it makes them feel safer. Unfortunately it doesn’t actually make them safer. All it does is subject them to snooping and abuse. Local councils had to be told to cut back their snooping on people they suspected of leaving their wheelie-bin lids open, or letting their dogs foul the pavement. Other officials have used cameras to ogle female airport passengers. Given the number of people with access to CCTV images, it can’t be long before we find people being blackmailed over them, as has happened in the US. Maybe it’s already happened here too.

While CCTV images may give officials a thrill, the Met study confirms that they are utterly useless in prosecuting cases. Often, the images are not clear enough to make an identification that would stand up beyond reasonable doubt. More often still, the images are not securely stored – so the courts throw them out, on the grounds that they might have been tampered with.

Hat tip to Conor for the link

2009 09 20

Debating
Politics
legal stuff

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The media – moral power without responsibility?

Really good article here on how the media has taken incredible power without responsibility in terms of its ability to critique and question without having to deal with the ‘reality’ of governance and how this ‘morality’ can often undermine ‘good’ policies. Though I think the author is perhaps a little bit too harsh, and possibly overstates his case he has some good points and he article is well worth a read regardless.

This point on the mixture between the media’s moralizing and its effects on policy gives a good example:

Because the media confuse victimization with moral right, American troops in Iraq have had occasionally to contend with unsympathetic news coverage, which in an age of mass media has concrete tactical and strategic consequences. Last spring, I accompanied the first United States Marines into Fallujah. After several days of intense fighting, the Marines — reinforced with a fresh new battalion — appeared on the verge of defeating the insurgents. A cease-fire was called, though, snatching defeat from victory. No matter how cleanly the Marines fought, it was not clean enough for the global media, famously including Al-Jazeera, which portrayed as indiscriminate killing what in previous eras of war would have constituted a low civilian casualty rate. The fact that mosques were blatantly used by insurgents as command posts for aggressive military operations mattered less to journalists than that some of these mosques were targeted by U.S. planes. Had the fighting continued, the political fallout from such coverage would have forced the newly emerging Iraqi authorities to resign en masse. So American officials had no choice but to undermine their own increasingly favorable battlefield position by consenting to a cease-fire. While U.S. policy was guilty of incoherence — ordering a full-scale assault only to call it off — the Marines were defeated less by the insurgents than by the way urban combat is covered by a global media that has embraced the cult of victimhood.