The Amish are watching you
I came across this interesting article in the Philadelphia Inquirer today.
The article states the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, home of 55,000 people in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, has installed 165 surveillance cameras around town to watch its citizens in case they commit any crimes.
Instead of being run by the city government, Lancaster’s program is run by a private company, whose employees notify police if they observe any suspicious activity.
The program does have some elements to protect it from abuse, such as requiring employees to undergo drug tests and background checks as well as blacking out windows, the safeguards are still woefully inadequate to protect abuse.
A jealous employee could easily follow an ex-lover around town or an employee could demand a bribe from a perpetrator instead of reporting the crime to police.
The article boasts that the camera system led to an arrest of a murderer, stemming from a fight that broke out in 2007 which was reported to police by a camera watcher However, the cameras were unable to prevent the murder and the large group fight on the street which led to the shooting would have likely been reported to police by neighbors anyway. In fact, the article states that the crime rate in Lancaster has been roughly static since the camera’s inception. The cameras have frequently been used to arrest people for crimes such as drinking and performing sex acts in public–crimes that are meaningless if they are unseen.
The priority of the Lancaster Police Department should be to protect the citizens’ public safety, something which a faulty spying program cannot achieve.
[Plenty of cameras monitor 55,000 Lancaster residents - Philadelphia Inquirer]
User Comments
Jocelyn
July, 2009
Generally speaking (and I did a paper on this back in college) cameras are not effective at reducing crime. On the other hand, they supposedly make people FEEL safer. Take from that what you will, I suppose.