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Comment by raxxorrax | Hacker News Reader

Britain uses a lot of CCTV but I don't see them doing better on crime. Theoretically that should conclude the topic.

Again, as always, what you call Britain the reality is that its centers around a small number of cities and primarily the heart of London. And again, a large percentage is privately owned and not wired into the kind of Person of Interest system that people appear to have conjured up in their minds.

Do you mean there's no public accountability for all the CCTV surveillance in the City?

Anyone running CCTV needs to register with the Information Commissioner and there are some limits to what can be done with the footage or how long it can be kept for.

Theoretically, good point.

In reality, LOL!

Could also be rephrased as "Do you mean that the all the CCTV surveillance in the City is decentralised and only accessible by warrant to each system owner?"

In the City, I can easily imagine there's still a single entity behind it, just one that's not accountable to the public. No idea whether that's the case, though.

In the minds of many people (especially British politicians!) the UK is actually "The City State of London with Four Inconvenient Countries Attached".

Doesn't seem to work power-wise considering London voted against Brexit.

Brexit was caused by London to some degree. Their financial industry creates a huge demand for the pound, which hurts exports for the rest of the country. This has dampened standards of living outside the Capitol for a long time now. This phenomenon is also called dutch disease. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

Not by a huge margin. And part of the Brexit campaign (if not most of it) was run out of London.

Part of everything in UK is run out of London.

It appears the City State legislated on the basis that the peoples of these inconvenient countries don't exist.

https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/38437/rights-of-t...

Similar views can be found between Sydney and the rest of New South Wales, and also between Auckland and the entirety of New Zealand (the kiwis affectionately refer to Aucklanders as JAFAs - Just Another F$%king Aucklander, because half the country lives there).

One would suspect such complaints about the friction between centralism and federalism are widespread across the world.

I always chose to believe it was Just Another Friendly Aucklander. I knew I was lying to myself, but it makes you feel slightly better than acknowledging 2/3 of your fellow citizens don't like you.

I doubt it is personal. I live outside of my state's major city (Sydney) and feel no personal dislike to anyone in Sydney. It is just difficult to understand why someone would want to live there. And I think people outside major urban centres often feel ignored by politicians and this leads to resentment.

There was a good, widely quoted paper that i read back in my uni days that analyzed crime rates all over uk in context of surveillance.

It heavily depends on the location type - parking lots were way way safer with CCTV presence, but there was no effect in public pedestrian spaces.

What do you mean by that? Prevention, detection or prosecution? Genuinely interested. For certain crimes (I'm thinking of the Salisbury poisonings for example) CCTV seems, on the face of things, pretty central to finding out what actually happend.

2 years ago facial recognition was used in Cardiff during UEFA final, the result was >2000 false positives

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/facial-recogni...

This is a classic example of twisting statistics to fit a narrative. That match had ~65k attendance with ~2k false positives for sake of argument. thats < 3%. Not great, but then consider the system is going to scan a vast portion of those in attendance which a human eye alone could not do. Even with the false positive rate, in terms of making human jobs easier, its surely a benefit to scan 2000 false positives than some large portion of 65,000 when checking for unsavoury characters.

From the article: "But of these 92% – a total if 2,297 – were incorrect, with just 173 providing ‘true positive alerts’."

Those are frightening odds when you consider the impact such system could have on those "false positives", eg. possible detainment until your identity is confirmed.

The police may have had the resources to check each case in person during the trial but you can imagine what could happen once there is a push for more wide adoption of these systems as a way to save on police resources.

I would also love to see the proportion of people with dark skin tones who were flagged as false positives.

Then what happens to the pictures of non-confirmed positives and negatives? Are they purged from the system automatically or are they kept around for a while? What recourse have the false-positive to not be harassed in the future?

Let's face it, this genie is not meant to stay in the bottle and it's a policing dream to be able to automatically identify potential undesirables, wherever they are. Why not at the entrance of banks and other sensitive places? Like sports clubs and parks and swimming pools. At every corner of the streets maybe?

The face recognition vans were standing on busy streets and sidewalks, scanning everyone, not just match attendees.

> Even with the false positive rate, in terms of making human jobs easier, its surely a benefit to scan 2000 false positives than some large portion of 65,000 when checking for unsavoury characters.

who says it sensible to check them at all? Basic probability. Let's say the false positive rate is 1%, and there's a criminal among every thousand. That means on chance alone you'll get ten false positives for each actual hit. (the low base rate makes the false positives much worse than they sound, same reason you shouldn't panic if you get a positive test for a rare disease).

That is a ton of work for nothing, a lot of people being stopped without reason, when the saner alternative may have been to not pester anyone at all. Discovering criminality comes at a cost to people who are falsely dragged into it, and creates opportunity cost for the police.

Arresting 10x people to get 1x guilty is terrible. Talking to 10x is great.

Letting crime happen investigated is not a good solution.

Do you base this based on numbers or gut feeling? I've always felt unnaturally safe in London despite it being a massive sprawl of people-filled chaos.

Apparently by the numbers, London is less safe than most American cities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_London

This always requires the question: less safe for who?

Per that article, in 2010 the vast majority of violent crime offenders were black - and I wouldn't be surprised if the victim profile would look similar.

Pure anecdata, but this was 90% of the news I saw. Gang stabbing in park. Gang stabbing at party. Gang shooting at club.

That page contains no comparison with any American cities? Do you have an actual source for your claim?

"Apparently"

Only 7% of crimes are solved by our police [1]. London is the knife crime capital of the world.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53443246

> Only 7% of crimes are solved by our police

Meaningless without comparison to other countries.

> London is the knife crime capital of the world.

Doubt it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate

While you may be right, knife crime is not murder. Knife attacks are less deadly than firearms and we dont see breakdown there.

Whyever would we compare it to other countries? We compare it to the past.

The statistics were compiled from 2015 and in just the few years since then solved crimes have halved: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49029545.

If you and I were to travel back in time to the high trust society before mass surveilance & enquired our police wouldn't deny they held the the monopoly on violence. My friends in the forces of today tell me they feel under siege most days.

Apologies, "London is the knife crime capital of the world." is part of the venacular here akin to "The man who broke the Bank of England".

Good points.

You should certainly feel safe in London, but you can also feel safe in Paris, Berlin or Amsterdam. That was the argument, your re-framing quite deceptive.

Numbers are difficult to compare since data collection mechanisms are subject to change, but here you go:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_London

The need for CCTV is marketing and gut feeling from my perspective because the numbers say it didn't do much.

Thanks - didn't mean to push an agenda for CCTV, just to be clear.

London used to be safer 30 years ago before all the CCTV. There are many factors involved.

A few years back I read a statistic in the economist that said CCTV coverage in areas reduces crimes at night to the same degree as better lighting. Sure, there is an effect but it can easily be achieved with other methods as well.

> Britain uses a lot of CCTV but I don't see them doing better on crime.

I think we'd need a comparative trial to really know that.

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