CCTV Nation
The UK is the WORLD LEADER when we count CCTV instalments. There is approximately one camera for every 14 people in the UK as of 2009 and this number is growing all the time. CCTV was introduced as tool to fight crime, as a technology to help us all feel safe. It was introduced to us through FEAR and it is again through fear they convince us that it’s a vital tool in the fight against crime and terrorism.
What they fail to point out is that CCTV has been proven in many official reports to have absolutely no effect on crime. Studies have shown in fact that in some areas crime has actually increased since the introduction of CCTV and fallen in places without it.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has himself spoken about results found in a study where he praises the effectiveness of CCTV. In a speech to The Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) in 2008 Gordon Brown talked about security and liberty:
In central Newcastle after CCTV was installed, burglaries fell by 56 per cent, criminal damage by 34 per cent and theft fell by 11 per cent.
He apparently got this information from a home office study numbered 252 (issued in 2002) but when you read this study it actually concludes that CCTV in Newcastle had an undesirable effect and that total crime fell by 21.6 per cent in the area with cameras but by 29.7 per cent in the area where there were no cameras. This is cold hard proof that our government is misleading us about how effective CCTV really is.
Of course CCTV has to be a success because in the late 1990′s a massive 75 per cent of the home office crime prevention budget was spent on CCTV. Surveillance has become such a part of our daily lives, to consider it a failure is unacceptable in the governments eyes. Especially when you consider in total from 1996-2006 over 500 million of our tax money has been spent on installing approximately 4 million CCTV cameras. It’s simply just another lie sold to us by our government.
It’s up to us, the citizens to do something about it. We owe it to the rest of the world because the UK is more or less the clinical trials for surveillance technology. We have 20 per cent of the worlds CCTV on our soil which is ridiculous when you consider the UK only holds about 1 per cent of the world population. The average person going about their daily lives here in the UK is seen by a CCTV camera no less than 250 per DAY, it’s almost as if the government don’t trust us…
To win this battle is not going to be easy because most of the population emphatically trust that our government won’t misuse it’s powers, they believe they are acting for the good of the people and that they deserve our trust. Yet this is a government who refuses to trust us as they install more cameras and treat us all as suspects.
The UK population as a whole is a good and honest bunch of people, only 2.6 per cent of us have a criminal record and only a tiny 0.6 per cent of us have been to prison. Does this justify the governments distrust, I think not.
A quote from THE OXFORD POLICING POLICY FORUM (2008)
Britain is in danger of becoming a society where everyone is effectively on parole.
And finally just to give you something to think about.
Any Government that assumes it’s public is going to do something evil has already lost it’s franchise to govern. The contract between the government and the people is that the government will trust the people and the people will trust the government. Once a government begins to mistrust the people it is governing, it loses it’s mandate to rule because it is no longer acting as a spokesman for the people, but acting as an agent of persecution. [Philp K Dick]
with thanks to Charles Ferrier.
