London 2006, Meet London 1984

Draape writes "Shoreditch TV is an experiment TV channel beaming live footage from the street into people's homes. According to the Telegraph U.K. television will broadcast from 400 surveillance cameras on the streets, into people's homes. For now they are only showing it to 22,000 homes, but next year they plan on going national with the 'show'. They fly under the flag 'fighting crime from the sofa'."

wow

[macadamia_harold]

combine this with the automated "racial profiling" with their ANPR cameras [timesonline.co.uk], and you've got an episode of COPS!

"BRITAIN'S most senior policeman Sir Ian Blair is facing a race relations dilemma after the release of figures that reveal almost half the number of people arrested in relation to car crime in London are black. Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, has signed off a report by his force's traffic unit which shows that black people account for 46% of all arrests generated by new automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) cameras."

Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone

[Kuukai]

There's a threshold though. If I do something stupid and 8 people see, I might shrug it off. If I do something stupid and 80 people see, I might not hang around that part of town. But if I do something stupid and 80,000 people see, then I might be scarred for life. It's just not meant to work that way.

Television Programs

[8ball629]

The TV programs in the UK must be pretty bad if they actually get ratings on that channel. I mean... other than the "nosey neighbor" - who is really going to sit there for an hour or more and watch people walking down the street? And how does advertising work? Will people walk by with a sign on their back for Nike and Pepsi? Maybe put a Pepsi machine in one of the camera shots? Anyway, my #1 question is what's the target audience? 50+ years old, single, unemployed people with nothing better to do in their lives than try to catch someone doing something "bad". I'm getting bored just thinking about how boring this would be.

Re:wow

[Maquis196]

I work on a community team and we use the ANPR facility quite a bit, the main reason is that its a GREAT figure generator! Thats what the home office want these days I am afraid. Safer Neighbourhoods was created to address the concerns of the community we serve but instead we have to use things like the ANPR to get figures to make sure that our existence is worth while.

Racial profiling is a bit of a harsh thing to say, having spent countless hours on ANPR operations ive discovered that the ANPR is actually the least descriminate form of crime fighting going. It reads number plates for crying out loud, it doesn't actually look at whos driving! If your car has no insurance, then your gonna get pulled over! No tax? pulled over. Theyre all punished on my operations.

Just my two pence

Maquis196

Re:Prevent crime?

[ajs318]

What this really is, is an exercise in "grooming" the public to accept privacy invasion on an even greater scale.

CCTV cameras are known to have a definite effect on crime; they displace it to camera-free areas, where it obviously isn't anyone's problem. There was an incident a few years ago, along a road out of the city where every building is a shop, restaurant or pub. Some runt went around spraying graffiti on every establishment that was not CCTVed. The only images were a few blurred, grainy ones of him running from one shop to the next.

If the "experiment" is not universally opposed, the government will find a way to take it nationwide. The more affluent areas of every city will be filled with cameras that anyone can monitor. Crime will simply be displaced to the non-CCTV areas. Meanwhile, the public will gradually be getting used to the concept of never expecting to be able to go totally unobserved. The way will be paved for ever deeper intrusions into individuals' lives.

"Mummy, does Jesus watch you when you're on the toilet?"
"As long as he's watching channel 36, yes!"

Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone

[hobbes75]

As far as I am informed: The violence dropped just after the relaxing of the police enforced closing time of the pubs (which is only several years after the introduction of heavy surveilance of the general public). Main reason is probably that less drunks are the same place at the same time since they go home over a 2h period instead of a 5m period.

Re:Television Programs

[Kadin2048]

Actually I foresee that a channel like this (or channels) will generate its own programming.

You'll have people basically seeking out street cameras in order to do their own little versions of "Stupid Human Tricks," or "Jackass." Then people will record and share the best bits, clips shows will ensue, and the great majority of people will watch the predigested, narrated clips shows.

Re:Welcome to the World of Tomorrow

[Anonymous Coward]

ISBN code, please. I'd like to buy it.

What will happen

[amateur bore]

It won't be long before everybody who wants their fifteen minutes of fame will be 'performing' in front of those cameras. It really is more like Big Brother the TV show than Big Brother the novel. With a little imagination, it could get quite entertaining ...

Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone

[fossa]

I wonder if advertisers will pay people to carry large signs as they walk through town?

It is political correctness gone overboard

[SmallFurryCreature]

We all know how crime was handled in the old south. Arrest the nearest black person. Worked especially well in rape cases cause everyone knows those niggers just can't keep their hands of white women right?

To combat this you have to have a legal system wich is "blind". It is the reason that justice statue has a blindfold.

The problem is that every police person can tell you it is a load of bullshit. If you see a group of black people in a poor area of london in an expensive car you know it is stolen.

Note here that the figure is that 50% of ARRESTS involve blacks. NOT stoppages. The only way people are arrested after being stopped is if they have been found to do something illegal.

What the story is effectivly saying is that the police shouldn't arrest so many black people. But how? Let them run because "oh yeah he done it but we are over our quota off blacks for this week". Arrest white people on made up charges?

Cause the horrible fact is that blacks just seem to commit more crimes or at least be caught more easily. But you can't say that.

This system is impartial. It just looks at the facts and flags a vehicle as suspicious or not.

In fact at its simplest it checks wether a vehicle has been stolen and then tells the police to pull it over.

if then it is found that in 50% of the cases the driver is black what the hell can you do about it.

In holland we got a similar case. Suriname (former colony with a largly black population) is a known traffic route for drugs smugglers. So customs check passengers on flights from Suriname more thoroughly then from other countries. Is this racist? Well yes and no. Obviously the majority of passengers from Suriname are black. Why aren't say asian passengers from Japan searched as well?

Because it ain't about racism. IF that was the case black passengers from japan would be searched extra as well. They are not.

The problem is that political correctness has made it impossible to accept any figures that suggest minorities are more involved with crime. This is just one extreme example.

Re:Forget 1984, the crims are going to love this o

[hackstraw]

Oftentimes, safety programs backfire, and make things less safe.

Examples:

1) Pickpocketing was an issue in some large urban subway. So to do the public a favor, they put up signs telling people to look out for pickpockets. Guess what? Right behind those signs was where the pickpockets would hang out. People would look at the sign, and pat their pocket where there wallet was, which in turn told the pickpockets exactly where their wallet was. Easy target! Pickpocketing became much easier as a result, and the signs were taken down.

2) Near where I live there is a highway that goes over a mountain that is occasionally covered in thick fog. They did a big study and spent something like $20mil on these fancy lights on the sides of the road. Well guess what? Being that the drivers were more comfortable and felt "safe" because the could see the side of the road, they would drive faster than they should, and its more dangerous to drive on that road now after they made it more safe.

3) Anti-lock brakes. I won't get into this because people here do not agree that increased friction between the road and tires with centrifugal force increases the likelihood of a rollover and fatal accident.

Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone

[scottv67]

I wonder if advertisers will pay people to carry large signs as they walk through town?

Here in the good old US of A, we've already got a better solution. We have ads plastered on the sides of big trucks that drive around all day long.

http://www.streetblimps.com/services.htm [streetblimps.com]

So, even though everyone in the US is complaining about $3 gas (I know you guys on the coasts are getting hit worse than that), trying to reduce air pollution and trying to find alternative fuels like biodiesel and ethanol, we have DOUCHEBAGS who drive a big truck around all day burning fuel for no good reason. They aren't doing anything useful - they just drive around all-day adding to the number of vehicles on the road and burning-up our precious fuel.

Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone

[nixusar]

thats how it first gets into your home..then they slowly take it away adn they are watching you!

Re:Prevent crime?

[neBelcnU]

Do not confuse anonymity with privacy, though it's easy to do. The only way I can think of to do this while protecting privacy is that the viewer must have no idea where/when he's watching, and no control over what he sees. You can still see faces (violating anonymuty) but with no idea where/when they were, you cannot violate the viewed-subject's privacy.

And has everyone on /. forgotten to ask "who's watching the watchers?" Forget the CCTV feeds, we need cameras in the police stations' monitoring rooms to watch what the cops are watching!

Now THAT, I'm all for.

Re:Potential for Abuse is too great

[vertinox]

In that case who the fuck cares, yeah you look stupid and some extra person watching tv saw it as well. So what.

I don't know. Something doesn't sit right with this model.

I think private organizations or persons could abuse the system and use information against innocent persons.

Oh... You were standing out front of a gay bar or a porn shop one day. Let's send this tape to your local church.

Or maybe that video hanging out in a Muslim neighborhood and even shaking an Iman's hand might get you tagged by right wing groups for a beating.

There is too many things I can think of that this information could be wrongly used in the hands of questionable individuals with enough resources to monitor CCTV of a persons whereabouts and actions.

Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone

[voice_of_all_reason]

Just imagine late at night, coming from a pub after a dozen beers, in a hurry to catch a bus that will take 1 hour to take you home, you forgot to visit the toilet before leaving for the bus, and there's no open public toilet around.

Count yourself lucky you'll only get a summons. The governor of my state (New York) in the US wants to put level-one sex offenders (automatic for public urination) on the directory for life.

Re:It's not 1984 if everyone can watch everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

But if I do something stupid and 80,000 people see, then I might be scarred for life. It's just not meant to work that way.

Well, just wait till every blogger on the planet runs a webcam out their window and streams from their cell phone camera. That's a surveilance network that the CIA would be envious of. It goes everywhere, it's private citizens doing it so no one can complain, and it has human intelligence behind the camera.

Society is simply going to have to grow up and face the inevitable reality that humanity as a whole is going to become ever more omniscient as time goes on. There's no means of preventing it. Technology makes it possible, but what really drives it is our social instinct to interact with other people. Unless we fundamentally change our human nature, we're not going to stop prying into other people's business. It's bad for evolution to ignore your neighbors...

Re:It is political correctness gone overboard

[RichardX]

The problem is that every police person can tell you it is a load of bullshit. If you see a group of black people in a poor area of london in an expensive car you know it is stolen.

So if you saw a bunch of 18 year old stoned and scruffy white kids tooling around a poor area of London in a top end BMW you wouldn't bat an eyelid? Interesting.

Personally, I would say that if you see a group of poor people in a poor area of London in an expensive car, you know it is stolen.

The question is, why is it that all the poor areas are filled with blacks?