They won't stop until every room in every home has mandatory cameras installed.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-rap...
And we will happily implement the APIs and integrate the databases they need to do it so long as they tell us they're gonna use it to prosecute our neighbor's cash landscaper for tax evasion, fine the teenager with a loud exhaust on his car and find our stolen packages (as if that ever happens when the less equal animals are victim).
People have such short sighted and infantile attraction toward seeing the surveillance state as being used "optimize society" by enforcing whatever their pet issue is that they fail to see the average or median case it will be used to enforce something they don't care about at all and will frequently be used to enforce things they don't really want enforced that hard.
I've read so many accounts of people with Ring footage of a theft who tried to give it to the police and they refused to even look at it. I don't think I've ever heard of someone actually getting stolen property back outside of a Mark Rober video.
The police surveillance state isn't there for you, and people need to realize that. <stage whisper>It's there to serve the interests of Capital</stage whisper>
It’s even worse than that. I showed them two sets of camera footage of staff in my retail shop stealing from the cash register, and tallied it up my accounts to prove the amount…and CPS said “not enough evidence”. The camera footage was so clear you could see the 20 on the notes.
I couldn't believe how mostly-positive the comments on this story[1] were! I get that loud cars at night suck ass. I've been there. I currently have a related problem of neighbors randomly lighting of fireworks at night, so I'm not unsympathetic to these quality-of-life issues.
But there's something heartbreaking to see the hacker community—which was once overwhelmingly opposed to mass surveillance—starting to beg for it instead. Yeah, yeah, I know that HN is not a monolithic group; viewpoints do vary. But I can't shake the feeling that if the story below was posted to HN 10 years ago (or Slashdot 20 years ago), the comments would not have been so fawning.
And 'they' get smarter too - if you watch Skyfall, one of the better recent Bond movies, there is a nice speech about why MI 6 needs more and more surveillance, powers and budget in front of government officials, because of boogeymen and so on. Of course the whole meeting is attacked by the main adversary. Its exactly kind of glorifying speech that CIA (or FBI, army, air force etc.) likes to sneak to Hollywood movies to purport the image of good guys fighting to save democracy and little children (when we know thanx to Snowden how things look like in real life). Hollywood in exchange at least gets access to special places like aircraft carriers or military bases, not sure what they got in UK, maybe just extra budget.
Firstly the stabbings are fairly infrequent and mostly isolated to territorial disputes between idiots and the odd psycho. You can walk past the perpetrators up to the eyeballs in Apple kit at midnight and say hello and they are fine and they actually help people in the local community. Just don't sell crack on their territory and you won't end up with any extra holes. I feel completely safe here unlike when I travel to the US.
Secondly most of the surveillance is broken or ineffective or unmanned so the possibility of a conviction or an issue from it is fairly low. Really no one is that bothered about it. That is amplified by the constant tales of incompetence in this area and anyone who's had any direct experience with it.
Realistically we do live in a bit of a pit of apathy but that's because it doesn't really have any detrimental effects on our lives on a daily basis. If it does then we tend to flip our shit rather rapidly and deal with it. Case in point a box junction camera was recently added to a very difficult to cross obscured junction. Bad decision by the council just to make money. After about a week someone burned the camera down. They replaced it. It lasted another week before it was burned again and they got the point.
The council never reinvests in infra that is destroyed. They don't work like you think they do.
Personally, I'd never stand with something like a Nintendo Switch out in public in "London", but it honestly depends on the area of London. Some are much worse than others for crime.
I think the point is that whilst stabbings might not be high, the use of knives as a weapon to intimidate and mug people (going beyond just purse snatchers) is very effective, and much more common than you might imagine, nobody wants to get cut, and nobody really wants to stab anybody over a few hundred quid of electronics.
There are not frequent stabbings. They are reported on because they are so rare.
There were 235 homicides with a sharp object in the entire country of 60+ million people in 2021, which is about one third to half of all of them (which makes sense, without a gun, your options are limited). That makes fewer than single cities elsewhere.
If you think the UK is a specific violent crime hotspot, consider what angle whoever is telling you that is trying to push.
I presume the reference to gun violence means you're comparing the UK to to US. This is nonsense, gun violence hasn't been "replaced" with stabbings - the UK homicide rate (by any means) is a sixth of the US's - 1.2 per 100,000 people for the UK vs 6.3 per 100,000 people for the US. [0]
Not only that but the US has a higher rate of knife murders than the UK. The US had 1739 homicides by knife or other cutting implement in 2020 [1], or 0.52 per 100,000. The UK had 235 knife murders in the year ending in March 2021 [2], or 0.35 per 100,000.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in...
[2]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
If you look at knife crime in the UK, especially in deprived areas, it's been a growing problem for a long time.
For example, there was over 15 thousand knife crimes reported in London alone in 2019/20, many of which are armed muggings etc.
Knife crime in the UK is a red herring.
Year beginning April 2020 to March 2021:
– Fatal Injury – 223
– Injury with intent to cause serious harm – 21,421
– Threat to kill – 4,984
– Attempted murder – 465
Yes stop and search affects knife crimes, but there is still a lot of violence, and overall rates of violent knife crime have risen notably faster than the population has grown in London over past 10 years.
> instead of gun violence, there are frequent stabbings
According to [1], in 2020/21 there were 235 homicides involving a knife or other sharp instrument in England and Wales. Because of the ability of COVID lockdowns to influence those numbers, let's wind back to 2017/18* - incidentally the highest recorded - at 281.
By contrast, per the FBI [2], 72.6% of the 15129 recorded homicides used a firearm - that is approximately 10983.
Per Wolfram Alpha, the population of England and Wales in 2017 was 58.3 million, and the population of the USA in 2017 was 325 million - meaning the UK had approximately 18% of the US population.
Clearly, you are _VASTLY_ more likely to be murdered by gun violence in the US than by knife crime in England or Wales.
Notice this only covers gun violence and not other types of homicide - even the rate of knife crime in the US is higher than the UK, as others have subsequently pointed out.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/978830/knife-homicides-i... [2]: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
* The UK records April->March for such figures, the US seems to report calendar year. 2017 was a high water mark for both countries.
Here's the thing first off the US is more multicultural than any other nation on earth, most other countries have had one ethnicity/nationality in it for 100s of year. The US by contrast has always has a mix of different cultures and backgrounds coming into it, from the Irish to the Italians, from the Slavic people's to the current influx of Latin America migration. This may not seem like a big deal but there are differences between cultures and having a heterogeneous cultures results in places where they will come in conflict.
2nd the United States is a group of states that are united. This isn't like simply administrative divisions, there are clear and distinct separations and lines of authority between different levels of administration, so much so that going from Illinois to Florida has such a wide gulf in laws, policies and enforcement that it is more like comparing France and the UK than Scotland and Wales.
Finally the size, the US is big, huge in fact. It's so big that there are numerous states within the US that could fit multiple European countries in them with room left over.
All in all this comparison on gun deaths or really any other metric between the US and any other country except from Russia or the EU is like comparing an SMBs closet "data center" to an AWS data center, they are totally different discussions.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
Let's take a single state: Texas. Population in 2017 was 28.29 million. Per the CDC [1], there were 3513 gun deaths in Texas that year. I believe this includes suicides, so let's take a conservative rate here and assume that 40% were homicides and 60% were suicide (I believe that this is over-estimating suicide).
So, 1405 gun-related homicides in Texas that year. But, Texas only has around half the population of England and Wales. I'm sure you can do the rest of the math yourself.
But, maybe Texas isn't to your liking because it's so big by land area - so let's also look at Alabama, which is approximately the same size. 1124 gun related deaths there per [1] in 2017, and conservatively assuming 40% of those were homicides, that is approximately 450. However, the population of Alabama was less than _just Greater London_ - only 4.87 million people.
But, maybe Alabama isn't to your liking either because it's conservative. So let's look at New Jersey - only just larger than Wales by land area, and substantially smaller than England, but trending "liberal" by US standards.
In NJ, there were 478 firearm-related deaths in 2017. Again if we conservatively assume 40% homicide, that's around 191 - finally a state where the absolute number is less than knife-related deaths in England and Wales! But, one where the population was only 8.8 million...
None of these include knife crime in the US, either. While you can make all the excuses you like for this, the numbers don't look very good regardless of how you cut (or shoot) it.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...
I’m a bit baffled by the way you calculate gun murders. You get a number of gun deaths and guess the number that were murders.
I tried searching and could only find the combined value that you have used. Why is this?
The way I estimated gun murders was by taking a guess at around 40%, on the basis that conservatives (likely to be pro-gun) claim that 6 in 10 gun deaths are suicides, and they likely over-count.
By a "combined" value do you mean for England and Wales (which is because that is the reporting authority), or for gun deaths overall (which is because that is what is reported by the CDC - I'm sure this is broken down elsewhere but I only had a few minutes)?
I don’t understand really why the gun homicide rate does not appear to be available - it’s certainly surprising to me that it’s not easy to find.
Every state except New Hampshire (0.9) has a rate substantially above the UK (1.2). And NH was 2.4 the year before. Next best is Maine (1.6). So even taken individually, it's not good.
> policies and enforcement that it is more like comparing France and the UK than Scotland and Wales.
The UK and France are almost exactly the same (both 1.2).
This is a new angle I haven’t heard. Having multiple cultures doesn’t need to mean they murder each other. But let’s say that there is something special about the US cultural makeup that causes a higher level of violence.
The murder rate has been declining. Why?
But that's no different than a random photographer taking your picture, or a grandmother noticing you come and go through a window?
I agree "privacy" isn't the perfect word, but seems to be the best one we have to describe what we're losing as surveillance expands.
You are sitting on a park bench. It would be considered an invasion of privacy if someone opened your bag and took out a diary or note book and started reading it.
If you were meeting a friend in a public space and someone later confronted you about something you had said and produced a recording, it would probably make some portion of people uncomfortable.
But pointing it directly across the street at a particular house and leaving it there for days, weeks, months on end would probably attract some kind of negative attention from the homeowner, especially if you told them you were live-streaming to the internet (password-protected/encrypted or not).
I'm no lawyer, but, to me, that feels closer to sitting outside their house for days like a detective in an 80's movie than photographing public happenings.