CCTV Britain: Welcome to our Dystopia

Nicholas

What the CCTV numpties have overlooked is that it is not seeing the crime that is the key but the response to it. No good when your masked bandit with sawn-off is smashing the post office door in if all the local plod are somewhere else taking earnest statements about a pensioner who is suspected of uttering a heinous hate crime.

CCTV is the big silver bullet industry in the UK, conning a town council near you. This gimmick is just an admission that they have far more cameras than people to watch them properly - or police to respond to the incidents being recorded for posterity.

Kevyn Bodman

CCTV is almost worthless.
About 80% of images are of such poor quality that they can't be used.

What we need is highly visible preventive policing allied with severe sentences for criminals who commit crimes, particularly violent crimes.

These crimes should be the old 'traditional' crimes, not the 3,000 odd offences created by NuLab.
All those offences should be repealed in one afternoon by a Great Repeal Act.

Anybody who thinks it should be a crime to read out the names of war dead at the Cenotaph is a dangerous and evil idiot.

Shane Glackin

It's a bit silly paying people to watch the tapes; the primary point of CCTV is less to catch crime being committed than to deter it by having a record.

It's remarkable how few of those seriously opposed to CCTV have lived in deprived urban areas, or experienced its effects there. As a former resident of Stockwell, I would say they improved the quality of life in my flat-block by about 150%. The freedom to go about one's business in the immediate vicinity of one's home without the ubiquitous threat of physical violence is not to be sneered at, as civil liberties go.

Relatedly, it's always interesting to see how very much less opposed to CCTV women are than men. That should certainly give us pause.

Beer Moth

Close run thing whether to join this scheme or carry on watching X factor.

Nicholas

"Relatedly, it's always interesting to see how very much less opposed to CCTV women are than men. That should certainly give us pause."

Last time I checked the word "nanny" related to the female of the species, although I admit many of the wimps and old women now responsible for so much of the "something must be done" state are actually biological males.

The swordstick, pistol and bobby on foot patrol used to be an equally effective deterrent to the "ubiquitous threat of physical violence" but alas the aforementioned nannies, wimps and old women have removed our right to resort to the former two and the latter are now busy monitoring thought and speech as the armed wing of the social services. So we are left with CCTV - but it is a sticking plaster not the big picture.

john miller

Three memebers of my family have been the victims of theft, all recorded on CCTV. For whatever reason, the theives were not prosecuted.

The cameras (and the new Mental Health Act) exist solely to entrap those people the authorities want to punish.

Once upon a time, in the old fairy stories of my youth, a crime was committed and the culprit prosecuted. Now the culprit of wrong thinking is fitted up with a crime. Where is Damien Green now?

Kittler

Snooped upon by CCTV. What difference does it make, in a public place, if you are observed through a TV lens, a spectacle lens, or a plain old eyeball lens?