Having spent half my life in one and half in the other it is very interesting to compare the different ways in which attitudes to privacy and personal integrity are violated.
In the UK it is normal for everything to be surveilled. CCTV on every corner and every road etc. To someone with a "rugged individualist" US attitude this is appalling. "What, what, you're going to give me a speeding ticket and you didn't even have to catch me doing it? WTF, that's not cool."
Yet in the US it is rather normal for people in authority to kill someone when the target is running away or convicted of a crime. To the UK attitude this is barbarous.
How it feels to me is that the UK tends to co-opt a lot of modern US ideas badly: without empathy or sympathy or respect for individual rights. In the US it feels like there is at least some measure of collective guilt (or at least shame) over surveillance whereas in the UK those doing it are either gleeful or at least remorseless.
No sir, not me, not these days.
When I was younger, and in the US, and frequently traveling between states I did manage to rack up a significant number of speeding tickets. There were all, to use a UK term, a fair cop: I was speeding and I was caught by an officer of the law patrolling the roads who stopped me and gave me a ticket in person.
Getting them in the mail several days after the fact, without ever knowing you were speeding in the first place is a) confusing, b) not great for immediate enforcement and safety concerns.
If I'm being careless and/or distracted in one of those zones, I want to know about it immediately, not up to 14 days later after I've already plowed through a bunch of schoolchildren.
Well here they all are: http://www.longislandredlightcameras.com/
Again, no credible source.
Dad, if you read this I didn't mean it, you are very credible.
It used to be generally accepted that you were safe doing 80 mph but with the proliferation of average speed cameras people are a bit more conservative.
10 years ago it wasn't unusual to see people doing 90 - 100 on a motorway - now it's rare.
Nope. The limit is really 70, however to take into account possible inaccuracy in your speedometer or the traffic camera, there's some leeway in place. If you start assuming the limit is 79 then if nothing else, you no longer have the benefit of that leeway. How sure are you that both your speedometer and the camera are 100% accurate?
Made up: I thought the 10% came from the rules the speedometer is calibrated against which are +10% -0% i.e. Your speed will be 30mph but you could be doing 27. You will never be doing 31.
I guess the plus number is whatever the council have chosen to enforce. Another person from the country thinks it's 10%+2
edit: Here you go, it's a more nuanced than above. Europe's law. Read Page 8 - http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/trans/main/wp29/wp29regs/...
Displayed (V1 ) and the true speed (V2)
0 ≤ (V1 - V2) ≤ 0.1 V2 + 4 km/h
Most major roads definitely do _not_ have average speed cameras placed liberally along them. The only average speed cameras I can recall encountering are at roadworks sites (a move I 100% support) and along a couple of more scenic A-roads that are particularly enjoyable to drive along at high speed.
There are plans to introduce more average speed cameras on the new managed motorways, but I feel it is incorrect to claim they are liberally placed along most major roads.
I'd be pretty surprised if there were any average speed cameras along the A86 along Lagganside!
You may feel this. However, it does not match with my driving experience. I would suggest that as (in my experience) variable speed camera zones tend to come-and-go we may just have different experiences due to driving different roads or even driving the same roads on different dates.
I'm all for them if there are roadworks, but the problem is, is that for 90% of it, there is no damned reason for them!
On top of that, it's hard to stay aware of what speed you should be doing when it goes through: 70, 50, 30, 40, 70, 60, 50, 30, 50 (no lies) every few miles. It's a bloody farce.
From my observations (which are limited and unsystematic) some of these 'roadworks' are not roadworks but an excuse to put out an average speed check.
> On top of that, it's hard to stay aware of what speed you should be doing when it goes through: 70, 50, 30, 40, 70, 60, 50, 30, 50 (no lies) every few miles. It's a bloody farce.
This could easily be technologically solved. Why can't the highways agency publish these speedlimits in real time (with a sensible API) and allow our GPS devices (or even our cruise control) to tell us the speed limit.
I'm not saying speed limits aren't important. I basically never speed. However, there are things one could better use one's attention on whilst driving.
The UK certainly does look too readily across the Atlantic for bad ideas. But most of the home grown ones come out of a sort of domestic colonialism and shrinking empire. British police and (para)military forces were quite capable of street violence in Kenya in the 50s & Northern Ireland in the 70s & 80s. The frontier shrinks slowly; Scottish independence comes slowly closer, seemingly with almost no violence. Newspapers dispatch foreign correspondents from London to cover Manchester and Birmingham. People in the coastal towns complain of distant government that's only an hour away by train. It's more inattentional blindness that's the problem than physical distance.
The Met's antiterrorist role has let it take on the hard edge. But there is also a public demand for aggression against those percieved as "bad". People demand that "something must be done" while being vague about what that involves and who might suffer.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Low-Intensity-Operations-Subversion-Pe...
Yeah, excellent point. The British need for someone, anyone, to blame and be punished for everything ever is worthy of several dissertations.
Yes, Prime Minister nailed this one:
Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do it.
Oh shove off.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-p...
"England/Wales: 55 fatal police shootings in the last 24 years" "US: 59 fatal police shootings in the first 24 days of 2015"
Perhaps this is driven by the large amount of gun ownership and gun crime in the US, but I suspect it also comes down to cultural differences between police in the two countries.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unite...
Perhaps not "rather normal" but normal enough that Police are rarely prosecuted when it happens and judging by comments here and in other places, people seem divided about whether they even should be.
330 million people; ~1,000 people die by cop shooting per year (~750,000 police officers in the US), a fraction of those are likely running away or similar. So no, it's not normal by any stretch of mathematical imagination.
So yes, Americans are vastly more tolerant of police violence (to say nothing of stratospheric incarceration levels) than the British - mainly because black people are so disproportionally targeted in this country.
Indeed, among America's more reactionary elements, the unrestrained use-of-force and incarceration policies behind these figures are vehemently defended, as they provide an effective way to enforce a racially-determined class structure, even in the absence of the Jim Crow laws that performed this role until the late 1960s.
However, none of this would be acceptable if the police were equally harsh with everyone. Indiscriminate oppression is much harder sustain in the U.S. In that regard, we're quite different from the UK, where the "if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide" attitude is far more prevalent (it's a fixture in comment sections of British news sites, whereas American sites see it crop up far less frequently).
The fact that mass surveillance doesn't easily square with the more "acceptable" (read: racist) forms of police abuse in America is why Americans are far more unified in their opposition to it.
I found your thesis about the racist nature of police abuse interesting, especially how you tie it to mass surveillance.
I think you are probably right that this plays a large role in which communities and majorities will support or excuse this behavior.
I don't want to draw it too far, though. We should recognize that Muslim Americans get far more surveillance - more targeted surveillance - for merely being Muslim or having Muslim community respect. It's also true that people can and are fooled into believing and supporting principles, spurred by things like nationalism or political party identity, that actively harm or target their own minority groups.
This caveat I don't think invalidates your misgivings, which I think are good. If mass incarcernation and police abuse were as widely practiced on the wealthy or the majority there would be far more outcry.
A note to foreign readers of HN: In America, "terrorism" is an ethnically coded term. Mass shootings by white people - a depressingly frequent occurrence - are almost always described in other terms. In the rare cases where this dodge becomes impossible to pull off (e.g., the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh), the attack will be described as an act of "domestic" terrorism, thereby preserving the clear ethnic subtext that is carried by the unmodified term.
The notable exception to this rule is made for environmental activists, who are branded "eco-terrorists", or left-leaning people protesting economic injustices (e.g., Occupy Wall Street). In these cases, the deliberate use of a term with a strongly xenophobic component is a thinly veiled accusation of treason, which is a line of attack long-favored by the more belligerent critics of the American left (e.g., Joseph McCarthy, who provides the canonical example).
In the McVeigh case the FBI pronounced (and media reverberated) that the OK City bombings were a Muslim terrorist attack until it was shown, in fact, to be definitively not the case.
The language used to describe McVeigh's crimes and intentions was then continually watered down.
I'm not trying to say any of this is good, but my point is that it's incorrect to believe that it's "relatively common for the police to shoot a fleeing suspect".
I mean, it's true in an absolutely literal sense, in that having a gun makes you an outlaw, but it's wildly misleading in suggesting that the unarmed population will be subjected to a significant population of outlaws that has - somehow - managed to remain heavily armed.
To hear the NRA tell it, the law is simply a suggestion, meaning that people who choose to ignore it can do so with impunity. As places like England and Australia have demonstrated, this is absolutely not the case.
PS: The safety argument falls flat as truck driving is a significantly more dangerious job in the US. And driving is also the most dangerous part of a cops job.
Do you have a source for that? Every discussion of the number of CCTV cameras in the UK I've seen has always been talking about both public and private cameras (with by far the majority being private). Also I assume you meant to say per capita.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-circuit_television#Unit...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10172298/One-surveilla...
There are also a lot of state-controlled cameras monitoring places like public spaces in big cities, and we do have things like ANPR cameras monitoring lots of our roads, and there are genuine and legitimate privacy concerns about these technologies and how they are used. But please let's keep any discussion of them proportionate and based on the facts not the FUD. There are greater threats to privacy in this country than cameras that show you where the queues on the roads are before you set off to your London job in the morning.
Also that statistic on its own doesn't show that the UK has the highest rate unless you have number from other (similarly wealthy) countries to compare it to.
In my home city, Nottingham, because it's very hard to get a new licence at the moment, the police have such clout I heard of ridiculous scenarios where they started asking for 7 or 8 cameras in small restaurants in quiet areas of town.
Mapperley Road for reference. There were even crack whores on Google Street View on there for a couple of years...
So not that surprising. Also Mapperley Road leads onto Forest Road East, which at least used to be a notorious red light district and always have really skanky prostitutes hanging out on it.
You lived on a really bad street.
I lived 10 minutes down the road from you about 8 years ago, Zulla road. That area was really nice, although they'd recently finished a big campaign to stop robberies in the area due to, you guessed it, St Ann's residents.
I really don't think one extreme problem area should be compared to a restaurant in Hockley where all the hipsters hang out.
I think it should be compared. Hockley is right at the bottom of "Wells Road" at the arse end of St Annes and was a notorious shit hole in the early 00s.
Genuinely surprised they managed to clean the place up.
Still glad I escaped.
Hell, I don't think even the foaming-at-the-mouth UKIP eurosceptics try to claim the UK turned into a surveillance society due to the EU. Neither did the EU ask the UK to lead the global surveillance efforts in Europe through GCHQ. Not to mention the fact that it is David Cameron himself who is trying to get out of the EU's human rights framework.
Actually, if you define the solution narrowly as "undesirables on my doorstep" I suppose it is a solution; but since the wider problem is resolved by reducing the pool of undesirables for any doorsteps, only in the very narrowest sense.
Do you have evidence for this? I find it hard to believe that branches of Walmart in the US don't have CCTV cameras in them.
I am an American, and never thought there would be so many cameras.
I'm not offended when someone comments on our use of surveillance! I am offended when Americans don't seem concerned over the proliferation of cameras everywhere?
The UK seems to have a lot of visable cams. At least they can point out most of the cams?
Why do I have a sneaky suspicion the United States has more surveillance cameras than the UK, but they are hidden in very sneaky ways?
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret...