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Always under surveillance
More surveillance cameras have been installed in Toronto in a $2 million pilot project to fight crime – but is it all just optics?
by Francine Kopun
May 5, 2007
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/210722
Look up, way up, you can't see them unless you do. The new Toronto police cameras are fitted high on lampposts and traffic signal poles – the better to see you with, my dear.
They went in with barely a peep of protest, 13 cameras in four neighbourhoods: The Entertainment District, Jane and Finch, and two east Toronto communities.
The lenses are large and round and hang from big white boxes emblazoned with the word "Police." The lenses look more like lights than cameras, but make no mistake, they're watching you. Not that people seem to mind.
"Being filmed isn't anything new," said Brittany Campbell, 17, a high school student standing by the Chapters store at John St. and Richmond St. W., across the street from one of the cameras.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the cameras was not that they were installed, nor that they went in the same week that five surveillance cameras from two security networks captured a suspect leaving the scene of a murder at Bloor and Yonge Sts., leading to his arrest. No,
the most striking thing about the installation of Toronto Police cameras may be the lack of public outcry.
There was a time, not so long ago, that Canada's privacy commissioner was so concerned about the trend, he sued the RCMP in Kelowna, B.C., to prevent them from operating a surveillance camera in a park. This week, even the Canadian Civil Liberties Association had nothing to say on the issue.
Where are the protesters denouncing the march toward a future like the one George Orwell described in 1984, where citizens are tracked everywhere they go, even in their own homes, their very thoughts monitored for compliance with the ruling party?
Perhaps they're at home watching television, where grainy recorded images of suspects caught on surveillance cameras have become a news staple. Three times in the past month, suspects have been arrested after their recorded images were released to the media, according to Mark Pugash, a Toronto Police Service spokesman.
"We've had cases where within an hour of putting out the picture, the suspect calls his lawyer and says: `I'm giving myself up,'" says Pugash.
It has become impossible to venture outdoors in the city without becoming the star of a two-second television production: Girl Digging Through Purse for Bank Card, Couple Arguing, or Nosepicker.
You're on camera on the DVP, the Gardiner, the 401, at City Hall, the ATM machine, the subway platform, the GO station, in stores, on sidewalks and at red lights.
If you are stopped in Toronto by an OPP officer, the entire exchange – including everything you say – is recorded by a camera in the cruiser. Officers wear microphones secured to their uniforms. They will tell you that you are being recorded, but you do not have the option of not being recorded.
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A lot of potentially argumentative people are less so once they find out it's being taped," says OPP Sgt. Cam Woolley of the highway safety division. "It's also become very useful in court – a lot of people will basically lie to save insurance money."
The OPP also has access to the Ministry of Transportation's traffic cameras.
"Without them, we probably couldn't manage the highways because we have the same number of officers we had 30 years ago," says Woolley.
Depending on how surveillance cameras are operated and who is monitoring them, a lot could happen to that image of you, captured as you walk or shop or drive. It could be monitored by someone in a control room, who could manipulate the camera to get a better shot of your cleavage. He could print it and post it on the wall of his room.
Don't think it doesn't happen. In Tuscaloosa, Ala., state police have been accused of focusing their cameras on the breasts and buttocks of young women walking down the street. In Britain, police in a control room in the Midlands were recently caught taking close-ups of women with large breasts.
It could wind up on YouTube, where security camera footage has its own niche.
Toronto Police Service cameras have been set up to discourage abuse. The cameras are not monitored. There is no central control room. If a crime is committed in the vicinity of a camera, the recording is retrieved. Otherwise, it is erased within 72 hours. No record is kept. There is no audio.
The measures followed consultations with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, which has issued detailed guidelines for public surveillance cameras. The guidelines recommend collecting the least amount of information possible; they say that cameras should only be installed when other methods have demonstrably failed; that cameras should not be directed to look through the windows of adjacent buildings; and that if cameras are adjustable by operators, their movement should be restricted.
"The things that have been identified as problems ... in England ... can you poke and peek at things you shouldn't be doing, all that stuff, the police here have gone to some lengths to address that," says Assistant Commissioner Ken Anderson.
He said his office has not received a single complaint from the public.
In Toronto's Entertainment District, where many businesses already have their own private cameras and signs on their doors disclosing that information to their customers, John LeFave, a manager of Hal Burgers, welcomes the new cameras.
"They're absolutely necessary for this neighbourhood," he says. "It gets pretty ugly down here. We lock our doors promptly at 10 p.m. because we want to escape the club crowd."
There is no doubt the cameras help solve and prosecute crimes. Who can forget the searing image of two-year-old James Bulger being led by the hand away from his mother in Liverpool, England by two 10-year-olds who later murdered him?
In Toronto, video surveillance cameras have recently led to the arrests of suspects in three deaths: Bly Markis, 33, who was strangled in a stairwell of a downtown building; Nick Brown, 21, who was fatally stabbed on the subway; and Gerard Telesford, 44, whose beating was captured on a residential building's security camera.
Police forces generally report favourably on the outcomes of pilot projects, but studies of public surveillance cameras have reported conflicting findings.
A large British review of closed-circuit television (CCTV) studies concluded that overall, public surveillance cameras reduce crime, but only to a small degree. It found CCTV most effective at helping to reduce car theft, and least effective at fighting violent crime.
A 2002 University of Cincinnati study found that crime dropped and then rebounded after surveillance cameras were installed in certain areas of the city. While cameras seem to have an initial deterrent effect, people become desensitized to them over time, diluting the potential for long-term deterrence. It recommended moving them every two months as a possible solution.
Bruce Schneier, an expert on security technology and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, has said that surveillance cameras essentially "move crime around."
A small but interesting 1995 study asked once-armed convenience store robbers serving time in Washington state prisons to rank the most important factors that would deter them from robbing a convenience store. The presence of video cameras ranked dead last on their list.
The $2-million pilot project underway in Toronto was funded by the province.
"We're definitely opposed, the major reason being that they're ineffective and expensive," says Daniel Quinn of the Toronto Public Space Committee of the cameras.
"It's an inordinate amount of power that you're granting to the police that can and has been proven in the past to be potentially abuse."
He, too, has been surprised by the easy acceptance of the cameras. The legal challenge mounted by former federal privacy commissioner George Radwanski was dismissed on procedural grounds, and the office is no longer pursuing it. But during that process,
former Supreme Court Justice Gerard La Forest issued a legal opinion that general video surveillance for law enforcement purposes – recorded or not – likely infringes upon one's reasonable expectation of privacy. A Charter challenge on that basis could render public video surveillance illegal in Canada, according to a paper by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC). That is, if anyone can be found to challenge it.
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Like the author of this article, and some quoted therein, I just can
NOT get over the sheer scale and breadth of newfound utter indifference to this truly frightening shit.
I've spent the last few years fighting the violations of our civil liberties since 9-11. I have to say I don't find this issue high on my priority list. ... If you're doing nothing wrong in public, you should have nothing to fear.
Speechless...
Is this really the
only planet I can live on, for the time being?
.
I guess they did not view it as a big crime