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CCTV cameras in London
By Nigel Barley
As the weather hots up, in my street we are all discarding nocturnal nudity for pyjamas and dressing gowns. The reason is clear to see, a CCTV camera on the corner, the size of a shoe box, perched atop a huge steel pole and that can peer into our bedrooms. It’s not designed for that of course. It’s there to watch the library across the road where the youths of the area never borrow books but often drop by to steal a bicycle from those on offer in the rack. Or they regularly smash the windows of the cars outside to steal CD-players and anything left on the seat. But our new camera has other interests. It can also swivel and nod and zoom and, at night, you hear it humming to itself or wiping its face with a little arm that washes the lens. If it likes you, its gaze will follow you down the street until you disappear round the corner but, after a few seconds’ lovelorn lingering, it sighs and swivels back to the bicycles that are its bread and butter. It is alleged to have infra-red capability which means it can see in the dark, which the woman on the corner who watches too much Superman has described as “X-ray vision.” The odd thing is that we have no idea who is watching the pictures. It can’t be the police. They are far too busy rushing around flashing blue lights. It might be someone from the council, eating burgers and wiping the drool from their chin as they flip from screen to screen, chortling as they ogle at muggings in bus stations and vandalism in parks, or stare blankly off into space or even - just now and then and just for fun - peer into our bedrooms like the Malaysian religious police. There is another possibility. Some cameras are now computerised so that they home in on certain kinds of movements or can even recognise particular faces and either tune them out or in. It is possible there could be no one there at all.
In London, everyone is picked up by hundreds of cameras every day. We probably produce more daily footage each than Garbo did in her entire career. We are unable to watch the news these day without the jumpy, grainy footage of the CCTV camera that films the crash or the crime. As I walk up the road, as soon as I am offscreen from my own camera, I will be picked up by those outside the children’s home and the whole clutch lurking by the council offices. They look just the same. Perhaps they know each other. Maybe they talk to each other. At the bank, one peers back at me from inside the screen of the cash machine while others hover overhead. But they may well have been set up by one of the criminal gangs filming PIN numbers. You can never tell.
At the underground station, skinny, underfed cameras peer and poke and then follow you down the tunnels. On the trains, one scans you from each end of the carriage. But we know from the recent terrorist prosecutions that they are probably broken or unmanned or are not recording because no one has bothered to turn them on. They are there in taxis and on the buses but, on the new ones with doors at the back, 90% of passengers still don’t bother to pay their fares so that tourists probably think they are free. But, never mind, there is one tourist filming you on his mobile phone and transmitting the pictures direct to Uzbekhistan. People wave and smile. They are, after all, used to cameras for there are estimated to be 40, 000 CCTV cameras in London alone. Perhaps most people who watch the footage on Big Brother think everyday life has always been like that.
As you get off, there is a sign announcing that the bus, as an experiment, now has cameras outside as well, to catch offenders parked in the bus lane and blocking traffic. A little further along, in front of the underground station, there are traffic cameras, including a mobile one on the roof of a Mini that they drive around to catch people who have not paid the congestion charge. I wander along the street and walk straight into the digital photo of a huge, new Bentley being taken by a Nigerian traffic warden to prove the time he booked it for illegal parking. I stop and lean one elbow arrogantly on the roof, pretending it is mine and he giggles and waves me away.
In the shops, the cameras are everywhere, lurking under blue domes like cool dudes in shades so you can’t tell which way they are looking but, in menswear, I am pulled up short by a sign on the door to the changing rooms. “No CCTV cameras in this area” it announces to reassure the shy and encourage shoplifters. Or is it to warn the nervous that they are here not protected by Big Brother? A shiver runs up your spine at the thought but you know from elsewhere that there are yet smaller cameras they can hide in the coathangers and tracking devices that can be built into the packaging that show where you are and what you are up to.
I take the lift. That small blob up by the ceiling and pretending to be a rivet is probably another camera. A hugely successful video was sold a few years back, showing just what people did in lifts when they thought they were unobserved - everything from relieving themselves to group sex. There was a big outcry but it sold by the truckload. and there is little to stop it happening again. At the moment, there is no obvious group sex in this lift but then it is only ten thirty in the morning so that probably doesn’t happen till mid-afternoon.
I am meeting someone for a cup of coffee so I head for the café of a museum. At the door is a huge black security man who looks me over. In his lapel is an odd badge with maybe a lens at the centre and there is a wire that runs down his neck. At intervals, he thrusts his arm rudely in front of people to regulate the flow through the doors. No one demurs. That would be because of his uniform. From my own museum days, I know the importance of a uniform. I once saw an offensive drunk refuse to leave when requested to do so by the knighted Director but who complied like a lamb when a teenage security man in a peaked cap ordered him to do so. Inside the cafe, many more cameras, ignored by all except a fading TV personality who automatically arranges himself to show them his good profile and carefully smooths his hair to hide recession.
Outside in the gallery a sign says “No flash photography allowed”. If only they knew how many cameras are peering at them from odd angles. Cameras are very much cheaper than humans in uniform and the best museums now get them from Israel where they are designed with a whole range of doubtful, hi-tech, anti-personnel skills that proved useful on the security ‘fence.’
Beyond the front gate, on a gantry over the road, is a speed camera that flashes every now and then. It’s not looking at me but, carefully sited on a main intersection like this, it probably raises hundreds of thousands of pounds a month in fines. It’s huge and bears yellow stripes, like a sergeant major, designed to intimidate. There’s a site on the internet that informs you exactly where these are and explains how you can tell whether they are loaded with film or recording or just bluffing. A vigilante has been going round attacking them with paint and a chainsaw and, in the newspapers, become something of a hero to motorists. They caught him in the end, of course, on a CCTV camera he hadn’t noticed. Serves him right for doing a sloppy job.
I ring up a friend of mine. “Look,” I say, “You’re a sociologist so you know everything. Do all these CCTV cameras really work.” He immediately becomes shifty, like any social scientist asked a Yes/No question.
“The figures are open to dispute,”he hedges, “the Home Office claims they do but it depends entirely what you are trying to achieve with them and...”
“Yeah, yeah. This isn’t a funding application. But do they work?”
“They move the crime around. They give people an illusion of safety and the key to crime reduction, nowadays, is making people think that, if they offend, they will certainly be caught. But nine times out of ten, no one follows any of these pictures up so criminals know by now they will get away with almost anything and the percentage of successful prosecutions falls every year. Cameras help the police to get convictions in really serious cases but that is far too resource-intensive to be used more generally. Actually cutting crime could only work with zero tolerance and that’s too expensive.”
“Would they work then?”
“You’d still need the sense of shame and that’s gone- so no. The days are long over when anyone cared about what the neighbours might say and you would be worried about appearing on a Wanted poster. There have been all sorts of cases recently where people have deliberately filmed themselves committing crimes - even murder - on their mobiles and got caught because the police got hold of the video that they’d sent to all their friends to show off. Some yobs even take their own personal cameraman now when they go out for the night to shoot their exploits and keep an archive. Did you know, by the way, that they have just been trying out cameras in shopping centres with loudspeakers so they can actually shout at you, for littering or whatever, and tell you to stop. The idea is that everyone looks at you and disapproves.”
“Does that work?”
“Only because people feel stupid arguing the toss with a camera they can’t actually hit and smash because it’s out of reach, so they either comply or move away, expressing themselves in rude gesture. The camera can’t hear you see. They didn’t think that was worth the extra cost.”
A perfect image of government, then.
I walk back through the teeming street market. In a place like this, with so many dodgy activities going on you would expect saturation with cameras but there are none so perhaps there are older, unkinder, forms of justice that prevail among the hard-faced stall holders. Yet, even here, there is change and development. One trader, covered in tattoos, specialises in framed ASBO’s (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) on sale, the sort yobs are served with for vandalism and the general bad behaviour that makes everyone’s life a misery on the housing estates. They are a sort of injunction, backed by the court, imposing conditions such as curfews, areas you must not visit, things you must not do even if these are, in themselves, otherwise perfectly legal. On this stall, you buy a blank ASBO certificate, fill in your own name and hang it on the wall to impress your friends and look really cool, like those meaningless law degrees you can buy from American universities. Wait, there is another service advertised. Allowing for the fact that clients may not be able to write, the stall-holder offers to fill them in with his own firm calligraphy at no extra cost. No sense of shame here then but rather a pathetic sense of macho pride. They also have big, black replicas of tagging devices to put round the ankles of criminals on curfew so you can swagger around in one and show that you fought the law and you won.
And at the underground station, by the ticket office, the staff are struggling to put up a big poster showing the faces of people committing crimes recently caught on CCTV and inviting the public to phone in on an anonymous helpline number to identify them. This is something new that I have never seen before. I stop to take a look and a rushing man bumps into me from behind, gives me a shove and uses what is surely ASBO-worthy language against me. The camera pouts from the corner but, of course, does nothing but pretend to look the other way. No stern voice rings out to call this hooligan to order. No waiting guardian of law and order steps forward, grim-faced, to slap on the cuffs. The problem with the poster images here is that most of the pictures are out of focus, so foggy and grainy that it would be totally impossible to identify any of the people in them with any degree of certainty. Many are in black and white and evoke the nostalgia of bygone days. It is only the certainty that the whole CCTV thing is being run with amazing inefficiency that prevents its being a major threat to civil liberty. Yet ...come to think of it, a distressing number, even most of the women, could be pictures of me on a bad day. To judge from this, I am, it seems, wanted in connection with a serious incident in Wandsworth, a shopping offence in Neasden and a late-night assault on station staff in the West End. As I go through the barrier, I pull up my hoodie, wrap my scarf over my chin and snarl as I raise a hand against the inevitable lens. I swear they will never take me alive.
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