Kinda insane that this is necessary in some places. I am not super comfortable with these changes of having cameras everywhere, but I am sure some grocery store employees have to deal with a lot of “shady” customers.
Verbal conflicts can be unpleasant as well obviously, and the cameras can help identify those customers as well. I'm not entirely sure that the cameras well work as a deterrent though, they normal don't in other cases. A frustrated or angry customer isn't going to see the camera an change their behavior.
So you still need to have support framework in place for the employees who have these encounters. The cameras are only there to be able to identify customers, but I'm not really sure what they would want to do with that information.
I wouldn't just worry about the customers—the lady who recently died in a walk-in oven (at a walmart!) was unlikely to have been locked in by a customer.
Cameras on:
- public roadways, highways
- streets (nyc, london)
- businesses
- private cars
- public transportation
- interiors of cars
- perimeter of residential homes
- interiors of homes
- civilian law enforcement agencies equipped with body cams
- and of course the audio, video, GPS capable devices a majority of the world carries
- now adding to the list is private businesses equipping employees with body cams
The “selfie” and social media made us accustomed to posting personal information online as well.
The surveillance state is already here and people are barely waking up to this shit.
It did, but not as much as cheap technology did, at least when we're talking about cameras everywhere.
Almost a quarter century later, I remain amazed that Americans put up with locks the government has the key to (on our luggage). As someone who grew up in the Cold War, that’s the sort of thing we would have expected from the Soviets.
IIRC, it was during Nixon’s term that things started to go awry. I believe it was his administration who responded to security incidents on æroplanes with the un-American approaching of disarming passengers.
Remember, Americans reacted to the drugs and crime of the 80s and 90s by throwing more government invasion of privacy and erosion of due process at that problem too.
I don't think it's just fear, either. I remember the bloodlust and feigned victimhood that spilled out after 9/11 and I never want to live through that again. We got permission to behave in the worst way possible and so much of our culture never recovered from that. We now live under a more despotic government than we ever accused the soviets of. "patriotism" can kiss my ass
I suspect that's actually due to an extremely bad false positive rate on the police and court system; jailing a lot of non-violent people for petty incidents and failing to address more serious crimes if they're even slightly hard to investigate.
The United States leads the world in total number of people incarcerated, with more than 2 million prisoners nationwide (per data released in October 2021 by World Prison Brief). This number is equivalent to roughly 25% of the world's total prison population and leads to an incarceration rate of 629 people per 100,000—the highest rate in the world.
...maybe it's time to try a different approach like maybe slowing the transfer of wealth to plutocrats and back to the lower and middle classes.
El Salvador passed us a couple years ago, but yea your post is right on the nose.
EDIT: only in per-capita.
Note that those are driven by the policies of the current government, I'm not saying that the Salvadoran government is bad _at all_, I'm saying that the 'imprison everything' part of the set of policies is probably the less effective one.
Also Salvador uses (and probably reinforce) non-salvadoran cartels to help destroy their local gangs, and I'm not sure that this works if every country does the same.