Thursday, November 02, 2006

CCTV

Why do so many people on the left want more comunity police on the streets who recognise the people from the locality but not CCTV that can recognise people. Seriously what is the difference? Other then the fact that the police can act if immediatly?

5 comments:

Seamus Ryan said...

CCTV should be used to assist community policing and not instead of community policing. Despite being promised 2,000 additional Gardai over 5 years ago we are still awaiting their deployment. To try and bring this down to a "left" or "right" issue does not make any sense. The question to be asked is whether it is right to use CCTV in place of gardai on the beat. I don't believe it is.

Simon said...

That was not the point of the article in the Independent I was referring to. The point was that there was 2 many security camera's in England. And that facial recognition was orwellian

Anonymous said...

I think the real point is not that there is cameras but how is the data handled and who has access to such a system. If an orwellian goverment came to power it wouldnt take much effort to set up such a camera system if it did not already exist. So if the system is used to passively identify wanted criminals then this is okay but if it used to track people for other reasons i think this is an abuse. It is the same online your email address's and personal information are sold off to spam companys i think this is an abuse of privacy and should be stopped.

Godwhacker said...

Penn & Teller did a good segment on surveillance for their show Bullshit. In their nonscientific experiment they found that given the chance to use the technology to watch for crime or invade the privacy of law abiding citizens, most could not refuse the temptation to become little more then high-tech peeping-toms.

Bock the Robber said...

I suppose a camera won't be looking for free pizzas from the take-away, or sleeping in the car down a side-alley,or knocking on the pub window for a free late drink, or arresting people on minor charges so it won't have to get in a fight with the real criminals.

Also, I bet a camera never jerry-built houses to rent out, and never farted in a prisoner's face, or planted evidence, or forged a confession.

Just a few random thoughts about why cameras are differently abled.