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Comment by knolan | Hacker News Reader

I guess you could look at major European cities like London where CCTV is pervasive and other cities with considerably less.

It seems to me that most of the justification for surveillance systems is focused on edge cases, terrorism and paedophilia which are statistically unlikely of affect the vast majority of people.

If you watch some of the reality TV you see in UK about CCTV surveillance you’d think the county is suffering from a crime epidemic when in fact a lot of the situations are minor and often escalated by overly aggressive police officers interacting with uneducated angry drunk people.

Better social policy regarding education and alcohol would be the better solution.

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> If you watch some of the reality TV you see in UK about CCTV surveillance you’d think the county is suffering from a crime epidemic when in fact a lot of the situations are minor and often escalated by overly aggressive police officers interacting with uneducated angry drunk people.

I couldn't find London's murder rate further back than 1990 for some reason, but for England, the murder rate is higher now than it's been since at least 1900.

We don't know if CCTV surveillance, gun bans, and silverware purchasing restrictions have had an effect reducing violent crime, but at the very least it hasn't been enough to counter the increase.

> Better social policy regarding education and alcohol would be the better solution.

I'm pretty skeptical that this would decrease violent crime and/or murders. Do you have any evidence for this?

Murder rate or murder rate per capita? Please, please source stats on this kind of thing or we end up talking past each other.

Watch out for "exceptions" causing confusing numbers, e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/20/official-fig... : "The official figures [for 2017] also show a 26% rise to 723 in the homicide rate, which includes the 96 cases of manslaughter at Hillsborough in 1989."

This article also mentions consistently falling police numbers. The police and court services are stretched very thin.

I never said it would decrease either, I said that better social policy would reduce the need for surveillance and aggressive policing — which seem to be more reactionary and designed to appease the typical Daily Mail reader. There are a lot of angry young men with little or no skills in the U.K. with nothing to do. This ASBO generation is who should be helped with better social policy.

The fact is that the homocide rate has utterly collapsed[0]. It’s difficult to compare the murder rate today with 1900 due to economic and cultural shifts. We may as well compare the execution rate, the domestic violence rate and the sexual assault rate too.

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/homicides

This is probably the best study out there, and it hits the alcohol point pretty well:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3015237/

Alcohol is involved in 40% of violent crime in the US.

https://www.alcoholrehabguide.org/alcohol/crimes/

What happens when you remove "angry drunk picks a fight" type of crimes from those stats?

Drunk people getting in fights is categorically different from violent crime committed for material gain (robbery, carjacking, etc). The causes for the problem and the way to go about solving the problem are totally different. Keeping people from getting angry drunk is not going to stop a home invasion. Stopping a home invasion is not going to improve crime stats because it's a single instance of violent crime. It's very possible to have a society relatively devoid of "violent crime" in which drunken brawls are fairly common. It's also possible to live in a society with lots of violent crime but no bar fights.

Including or excluding drunks to make the crime stats look how you want them to is no more honest than using gang violence to make the "mass shooting" statistics look how you want them to.

You can't just paint with a broad brush when it comes to violent crime (well you can but it's stupid and counterproductive if your goal is to understand crime for the purpose of advocating for public policy that reduces it). A drunk guy getting in a fight is different from domestic violence is different from robbing a delivery driver but they'll all show up when you "select * where includes_assault = true;"

It's true that they're different types of crime, but that doesn't make it not crime and it doesn't make it not violent.

Where did I say otherwise? Of course it's still violent crime.

That might be technically true, but it looks like the murder rate in the UK hasn't varied greatly over the course of the past century-and-a-bit, at least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention....

If you watch reality TV then you aren't getting the facts.

Of course, it’s not something I would normally watch. It is however very popular with my parents generation. They get very invested in the whole idea of the world falling apart when the data shows that crime is falling.

Maybe because of the "it was better when we were young" kind of ideas? Obviously it was and it will be for us too. We were younger, healthier, stronger and living in the environment we were raised into, not something made by younger and unfathomable minds.

I've seen some English reality / cop TV, it's entertaining enough - mostly because most of the crime shown there is benign, like idk, people driving without a license or drunk people. They probably make those shows on purpose though, showing on the one side that crime isn't that bad, and on the other to remind people to keep their insurance up to date because the cops are watching.

> when in fact a lot of the situations are minor and often escalated by overly aggressive police officers

Do you have a citation for this?

There appears to be a good bit of literature on the Stop and Search tactic[0] and also the examples of the harassment of law abiding photographers in the U.K.[1]

It’s race to the bottom policing that’s approaching the US model. Assume everyone is a criminal (when crime is at an all tome low), dress police officers up in tactical gear, and turn them into enforcers rather than protectors.

[0] https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abstractdb/AbstractDBDetails.aspx?... [1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jan/23/photographers-pro...

You can visit many town centres in the UK on a Friday evening and witness it yourself, to a degree. The Police also have a habit of speaking some other kind of language that has the effect of causing people who are already bad tempered to become even more so.

Of course no data, purely observational.

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