JT wrote:
You'd be happy to have a surveillance camera routinely checking all the rooms of your house then? I mean, you don't do anything illegal there soi clearly you've nothing to hide.
You know JT, I would have credited you of all people with the perspicity to see the difference between home and shopping mall. It's not about what I may or may not get up to thats important, it's about the criminal activity of others. I don't have yobs walking around my front room, there's only my family. In the shopping mall they are there aplenty; if I get caught walking past as the CCTV is monitoring them I don't care a hoot. Who is likely to be sufficiently interested in my insignificant little existence to want to put the footage to any sinister use? I am neither paranoid nor sufficiently self-important to believe that it would be.
JT wrote:
CCTV is policing on the cheap, but the problem is that you get what you pay for. CCTV doesn't stop thugs mugging people up in town centres because they know they are virtually unidentifiable from the film. Meanwhile we take the Bobbies off the beat and crime goes up.
I agree that CCTV footage isn't used or monitored to the degree that it should be. If it was, then just a few police officers could be deployed to cover an area that would take dozens if they only had their eyes and ears to rely upon.
JT wrote:
So for me it's ultimately about effectiveness, but civil liberties are as good a justification as any for stopping the nonsense and going back to doing things properly, which means real policeman providing a crime-fighting presence on our streets, and real policeman patrolling our roads looking for unsafe drivers.
To return to the original point about forward facing speed cameras, it would seem from many of the above comments that the main objection to their use is the perception that
other types of video or still footage aren't used to the same extent- a red herring or 'Two Wrongs Make a Right' logical fallacy. What if they were used to their fullest, would we object so strongly then? Supposing we had sufficient police on the streets backed up by properly monitored CCTV. Would we care as much about the civil liberties of the young thug caught full on camera punching some unsuspecting passer-by in the face and nicking their mobile phone?