Cash-strapped councils switch off CCTV cameras across UK
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
The man who made the announcement in the submitted article - Tony Porter (the English surveillance commissioner) has previously said similar things as you.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/06/tony-porter-sur...
> The increasing use of surveillance technology – including body-worn video, drones and number plate recognition systems – risks changing the “psyche of the community” by reducing individuals to trackable numbers in a database, the government’s CCTV watchdog has warned.
> In his full first interview as surveillance commissioner, Tony Porter – a former senior counter-terrorism officer – said the public was complacent about encroaching surveillance and urged public bodies, including the police, to be more transparent about how they are increasingly using smart cameras to monitor people.
Opinion polls differ, but it seems that most people in England just don't care about CCTV and that is worrying.
It's not a shame, his post was entirely void of actual content. It's easy to make statements like his, it's a lot harder to make posts like yours with real data to nuance the argument (I'm not being sarcastic in regards to your post).
So, while the UK isn't an authoritarian police state it does have too many CCTV cameras and a large segment of the public likes them. This thread has had people asking for more CCTV; other threads suggested the local authorities using CCTV and human surveillance to check that people applying for a school place lived in the catchment area for that school.
We have a very large police DNA database and we see people resist attempts to scale it back. You even sometimes see large groups of people volunteer to have their DNA taken to rule themselves out of a high profile crime. And that's even though we know that a DNA database should probably have as many profiles of criminals as possible, and a s few profiles of non-criminals as possible, just because data handling.
A lot of these avenues of privacy were only really enabled by the growth of large metropolitan areas.
In smaller districts, you can't go to the inn and sleep with another woman because the innkeeper went to highschool with you and will tell your wife.
For the vast majority of human society, you had to try a lot harder to hide your activities if you wanted to go against the current social mores. It's not really clear to me that the level of privacy we can easily attain today, even if it is a social good, is not outweighed by the group benefits of social cohesion, and newly found benefits of catching criminals after the fact that CCTV would provide/encourage.
Only if all CCTV were to become publicly viewable at all times by everyone could we speak of it as a force for social cohesion, rather than a mechanism for amplifying differences in power.
Even in the case where CCTV is owned by the government, its operated by individual city districts.
It's not a singular invisible omniscient organization.
The UK is a turnkey fascist state. Just waiting for the right psycho.
Until then, they are being used to solve serious crimes, like the very recent murder of Hanna K. in Berlin.
The doesn't even go to show how many people were shamed into doing things other than quit their job... Or stand down as a political opposition... or shut up. That's just part of it.
These things are happening and you just don't think about them, or hear about them, because for the most part people have short term memories or are completely complacent. Hell, look at the celebrities whose accounts were hacked, and embarrassing, personal photos leaked, not by the govt in this case, but our governments have this same information. You don't think they'd use it to get you to spy on someone, or inform on others?
When you have a surveillance state, everyone is an agent of oppression.
> someone who works in a high government office is
> slut-shamed out of their position because their
> personal email was gobbled up
The "tough on crime" crowd overlaps the "starve the beast" crowd, an interesting tension.
If data on specific cameras remains publicly unavailable, then the threat from the majority of cameras remaining online serves to keep the fear of getting caught essentially as high.
"In fact, the city’s predicament already seemed impossible. The council cut £37m from its spending in 2013-14, and another £38m is set to follow this year. Then, according to current projections, there will be further annual cuts of £40m, £30m, and £20m"
I think "cash-strapped" is putting it lightly.
[1] = http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/nov/24/-sp-is-saving-ne...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/pensions/...
Hooray someone who gets it. How on earth did you escape the UK hive-mind?
Do you like how they put all the UK pension costs under the main "welfare" heading then demand benefit cuts (excluding pensions) because the welfare bill is too high?
Do you know anyone else in the UK who knows or cares about any of this?
I think essentially every young person in the UK realises this and cares deeply.
I have a bunch of middle class friends. Many of their parents started out, got a decent job, bought a house. House is now worth 500K+.
For us to ever obtain that (without inheritance; i.e. in the same way they did) we would have to earn over £100K, or have dual income of 70K, ish. That's 5% if not 1% territory; it's essentially limited to business owners/senior mgmt and bankers.
So everyone rents. Who are they renting from? Well, not young people.
Of course, all of this capital will flow down the generations eventually, but only to a select lucky few. It's as if we had a golden age; a few decades of mobility for people to work hard within; and now family wealth is basically crystallised.
These days defined-benefit schemes are "normal" in the US only for government employees. In the private sector, they were largely phased out in favor of defined-contribution pensions, decades ago, with only a few labor-union-negotiated holdouts. This is probably a good thing for workers whose employer may go out of business or go bankrupt some day (cough GM cough) in a way that governments theoretically shouldn't.
Meanwhile in actually-bankrupt US cities, look at Stockton, California... especially renowned for government employees working insane overtime in their final year to make final-salary calculations as impressive as possible.
Most MPs seem to be generally knowledgeable about the world, well educated, qualified and have something to say about what they believe, even if you don't agree with it.
But most local government candidates seem to be retired nobodies with no experience of anything substantial and nothing enlightened to say about anything.
They always come across as the worst kind of petty lower-middle management on a power trip. Very uninspiring.
If the position of council chief exec (which is often very well paid) were elected, things would be different.
Oh, and the funding situation for councils is a mess.
28% of council tax bills according to this:
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2048574/Town...
Perhaps it's time for a boomer pension haircut before making further cuts on services that effect our kids.
The fact that pensions happen to be grouped in the same category as benefits is irrelevant. If they were in a separate category it would hardly change the figures.
Note that six million is the high end of the estimate, with the low being a (still rather high) four million.
This study included things like hospitals, prisons and sewage works. When talking about council-operated CCTV it does not make sense to use the six million figure.
The study estimates 1 in 70 of these cameras are controlled by the local government.
If it makes some police investigations take longer, that seems like a more expensive tradeoff.