Who said it?
I’m struggling with seeing the deployment of cameras in our local villages as being a benefit to policing. If it’s in our villages—are we really moving towards an Orwellian situation with cameras on every street corner? I really don’t think that’s the kind of country that I want to live in.
If it weren’t for his use of the term villages,* you might think it’s some “card-carrying member of the ACLU.” No, the speaker is Ian Readhead, the Deputy Chief Constable of Hampshire—the original, not the New one. He’s also the chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers’ data protection group. In other words, he’s a cop, and he’s worried about the surveillance society being created in Great Britain.
According to the Wall Street Journal, there are at least 500,000 surveillance cameras in London, and the paper cited a study saying that “in a single day a person could expect to be filmed 300 times.”
Video surveillance in public places has not reached this level in the United States (as far as we know**) and its effectiveness has been convincingly disputed. Yet despite the obvious potential for mischief and misuse, there is no shortage of politicians and government officials pushing surveillance of law-abiding citizens as a tool in the so-called global war on terror.
We need more Ian Readheads.
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*I don’t think we have “villages” in the United States anymore, do we? I mean, if we do (if it’s part of a municipality’s official name— “The Village of Lombard,” or some such), we don’t actually call them villages—at least I don’t. We call them towns. A “village” in 21st century America is more likely to be a shopping experience, I’m sorry to say.
**Are there really only 15 surveillance cameras in public places in the District of Columbia? (Those would belong to the DC Metropolitan Police. We have a few other law enforcement agencies operating here, to put it mildly.)
