Newark and the Future of Crime Fighting 172
theodp writes "Newark Mayor Cory Booker is betting that cutting-edge technology will reduce crime and spark an economic renaissance. From a newly opened Surveillance Operations Center, cops armed with joystick controllers monitor live video feeds from more than 100 donated cameras scattered across the crime-ridden city. The moves are drawing kudos from businesses like Amazon subsidiary Audible.com, which has moved its HQ to downtown Newark, where space is 50% cheaper than in Manhattan. But are citizens giving up too much privacy?"
"so this is how liberty dies, to thunderous applau (Score:4, Insightful)
"So this is how liberty dies, to thunderous applause"
at least that's how this summary paints it.
They've had this in london for a while, and it's been a severe invasion of privacy.
There have been several instances where the police have used cameras to follow people home and actually gaze through their windows.
One particular man was so horrified he started protesting it, dressing up in bizarre costumes and skulking the streets provoking police responses.
note to self: scratch newark off potential career location list.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who lives in the UK (Score:3, Insightful)
Where we have probably more surveillance than anywhere else in the world, let me shed a little light on how CCTV winds up working in the real world.
Re:Except, of course, cameras don't work. (Score:2, Insightful)
Nope, they don't reduce crime. They don't even prevent them. They don't deter and they are pretty much useless.
CCTV cameras are everywhere in the UK, but, according to a recent report by the CCTV manager of Scotland Yard... They simply don't work, despite billions of UKP invested. You can read this analysis here [guardian.co.uk].
Putting real, flesh-and-blood policemen, on the beat is the way to go. Putting cameras (which hardly qualifies as high-tech anyway) don't work.
That's an oversimplification. CCTV works against certain kinds of crime (burglary for example) but it is quite ineffective against others such as mugging (much more fast paced). The error made by the british was to think that cameras solve ALL kinds of crime
the Square Mile of London (Score:1, Insightful)
Right in the centre of London there's a square mile managed not by the Metropolitan Police but by the City of London police, and it's armed to the teeth with CCTV. Unlike recent America, a few years ago London did have a real problem with terrorism: every few months the Provisional IRA would plant a bomb, so the idea initially was to identify suspicious behaviour and/or to have records of just about fucking everything, so the perp dropping the bag or whatever could be identified after the fact. Did it stop the bombings? Of course it fucking didn't. This is London, not some village in the middle of nowhere:
(1) A wig, fake moustache, make-up and (fuck me this is high-tech!) change of clothing are enough to make anyone's face completely unrecognisable by current CCTV standards, and anyone will have mingled quickly into the crowd of a million other Londonners;
(2) Over time, criminals learn where the cameras are: each time evidence comes to court, each time someone infiltrates the police. I have one family member who works in a police operations centre, and he had to go through all the security vetting bullshit - the usual crap that's easily defeated by planting someone who (oh, much like, say, those in the 9/11 attacks) has a spotless record to date.
Now the terrorism threat is over (no really, compared to London when the Troubles crossed to the mainland, it's over), what do the City of London police busy themselves with? You may have heard of them as the guys that over-zealously notified a Church of Scientology protester that they shouldn't write signs saying mean things [guardian.co.uk] about the organisation. And it has nothing to do with the `Church' giving junkets to high-ranking policemen [guardian.co.uk], of course. They also occasionally follow those who look like they shouldn't be driving high-priced cars (remember this is around the rich financial district).
This is the dumbest thing since loaved bread (Score:3, Insightful)
Terrible crime will continue so long as terrible abridgements of liberty continue--people are always going to want grog, coke, meth and weed, and many people are ready to pay a lot of money for it. And just as many people are ready to do whatever they need to to make some money.
This is going to do is cause prices to go up, which in turn will lead to worse turf wars and drug related violence, which shakes everything else around it up. It's a white elephant, I hope this post will encourage some /.ers to look into this. Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) is a great place to start. We're talking $69,000,000,000/year to fight MARIJUANA. In fact, well over 800,000 in '06 went to prison solely for marijuana related charges, of these something like 70, 80% are minorities (though by a very large margin, drug users are white). If you want to get rid of crime, you need to get rid of the black market for drugs.
Giving up what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when do citizens "Give up" their privacy? In this case, and in most cases, they're having it taken from them by the government...
The simple fact is that the notion anything you do IN PUBLIC is in fact private, is utterly insane.
There are lots of great reasons to not like cameras all over. Giving up some imaginary "privacy" component to your public strolls is not, nor will it ever be, one of them.
People need to get a grip and understand they cannot walk around in a protected bubble 24/7.
Re:Any numbers to compare? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ill-informed American gun nut alert. Prepare for gusts of complete bullshit and "facts" gleaned from American gun advocacy groups trying to paint the rest of the world as "deprived" of their God-given Right to Bear Arms, and how they're all pansies/Commies/Muslims who Hate Freedom because they think guns are best left to the army and not vigilante cowboys.
Re:"so this is how liberty dies, to thunderous app (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I seriously doubt that you are the type of person that would have set foot in newark prior to the cameras. I work there now and they have a camera on the street which I work.
The purpose of government is to provide a sense of security; to provide an environment in which you can flourish. Newark was nowhere near that setup. if walking down the street was taking a risk - I assure you that you would give up freedoms. The level of freedoms you will give up will be directly proportional to the level of threat you feel.
At a baseline, we have given up community property rights, the right to drive at will, along with hundreds of other petty infringements of our freedom just to make sure people don't run us over on the streets, or so car accidents are minimized. Cameras in PUBLIC areas allowing officers to see a broader area is hardly an infringement of our liberty. One, this provides more substantive evidence that a crime is being committed than the word of one officer. It forces ethical responses from the officers. It provides a real sense of security for the people there.
When you end up in an environment where robbery is as daily occurrence and murder isn't out of the ordinary, I would love to see you continue to insist that police officers not be aggressive and that the areas you are in be unmonitored. Most people will demand a more aggressive stand by law enforcement and honestly this sounds a lot better than road blocks and car searches.
Re:It's time to reevaluate what privacy means (Score:2, Insightful)
You just can't argue both sides - i.e. that authorities can't identify a mugger, but they know exactly who you are and can even tell which page of The Catcher in the Rye you're reading.
Re:It's time to reevaluate what privacy means (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps I've said something to offend you or you've misunderstood a previous comment I made somewhere, but in this case, I don't understand your objections here.
It doesn't offend me, but it just seems a waste of time. You keep diverting the discussion away from the simple contradiction I pointed out, rather than addressing it.
There is no paradox: it would, unfortunately, be realistic to operate an improved CCTV network in a way that supports state surveillance, yet which still isn't a cost-effective means of preventing crime.
It's possible, but is it reasonable to make that assumption? We've had many on here claim boldly "CCTVs don't work!" while providing either no evidence to support it, or scant evidence which shows that current (newly installed) CCTVs have inconclusive results (and in fact really indicate that CCTVs do work and have merely fallen short of expectations).
... to denounce those same systems.
Then at the same time you have the privacy advocates like yourself who use a completely different standard, e.g. new technology, better police work, and legal, societal and procedural changes,
I just don't find it reasonable and I don't see how anyone with reasonable perspective can.
A CCTV camera can help to track someone, and perhaps with improved technology that would make it more useful for identifying who committed a crime after the fact, but it still can't jump down off a post and help if you're being mugged.
Respectfully, I think you have blinders on and are just looking for limitations to support your viewpoint on privacy. There are a couple of easy responses to your concerns:
1) tracking and identifying criminals is a great boon in solving crime and obtaining convictions - surely that is a good thing
2) a camera combined with a speaker certainly could be used to stop a crime in progress, without a single police officer getting off his ass
3) the camera can't jump down, but it will act as a deterrent and it will greatly extend the range of actual police officers
The question remains whether it is the most cost-effective way to reduce crime. But stating outright that CCTVs can't be a useful tool is just silly and ignorant, IMO.