Calgary Herald Column - Time to Blink on Surveillance

This week's Herald column from yours truly offers a critical look at the city of Calgary's plans to install 22 surveillance cameras downtown:

 

A revealing parallel now exists between Calgary's fixation on surveillance cameras and Toronto's fixation on gun control.

In both instances, we have politicians and bureaucrats overreacting to and capitalizing on public fears over crime by offering useless and intrusive policies that have little or no effect on crime and needlessly ensnare law-abiding citizens.

 

Both allow politicians to claim they are "doing something about crime"when they are doing nothing of the sort.

 

At least in the case of Toronto, Mayor David Miller and his allies are more or less powerless to implement any sort of gun ban. Unfortunately, the City of Calgary seems unencumbered in its zeal to unleash the watchful eye of Big Brother.

 

(...)

 

The most obvious case study has been the U. K., which has more surveillance cameras than any other country in Europe --more than 10,000 in London alone. The mounting evidence suggests that the British embrace of surveillance cameras has been a costly failure.

 

The head of images and identification at New Scotland Yard has described the surveillance camera experiment as an "utter fiasco".

 

Only three per cent of London street robberies have been solved with the help of cameras, and four of the five London boroughs have a below-average record of solving crimes.

 

(...)

 

The list goes on and on: last week, it was reported that after several months of cameras in Durham, N.C., not a single arrest had resulted. The Mary-land State Attorney's office says Baltimore's cameras are "not a useful tool to prosecutors." Tampa, Fla., brought in facial recognition technology in 2001, but dropped it two years later after zero arrests. The police chief in Oakland rejected cameras after concluding they would do nothing to prevent or reduce crime.

 

Here's the rub: not only are Calgary officials considering the wrong solution, it's unclear that there's a problem to solve in the first place.

 

That's not to say there's not crime in this city, but where's the evidence it's getting worse?

 

The most recent data available from Statistics Canada shows an 8.4 per cent drop in the overall crime rate from 2006 to 2007, and that includes a reduction in violent crime.

 

(UPDATE: Links added)