Do Cameras Prevent Crimes?
It’s finally going to happen. As I wrote in my post Pittsburgh Happenings – The ‘Burgh Sees All, Pittsburgh PA is going to install cameras everywhere.
The manufacturers claim that they help solve and prevent crimes. Well, of course they say they do, they’d be foolish to say anything else, they want to sell these systems, but prevent crimes? I’m not so sure. I am sure that as in the past whenever something good comes from this the cameras will get the credit even if it was just traditional investigation that got the job done.
“You can zoom three blocks away and read a business card or a license plate,” said Darrin Lipscomb, president of Avrio Group, a Maryland firm that won a competition to be the city’s surveillance camera vendor. “We’re going to have very sophisticated viewing stations that will allow any number of people to view these cameras in any number of ways.”
I want to know who is watching the watchers? and what is going to happen to the data? Even though the City assures me the data will go away I know that these days data never truly goes away. It’s much too easy and cheap to save, store and move around.
I keep reading that crime has gone down (but it’s too early to tell for sure). The studies that I have seen haven’t shown any real drop, the crime just moves to where the cameras aren’t. In the end I think that this money would be better spent on something that will really make me more secure everyday, like more detectives or fixing the potholes and making the roads that I drive every day safer.
