[BRIEF NOTE] A made-in-Toronto panopticon?

[rfmcdonald]

Yesterday, the Globe and Mail's Marcus Gee came up with an article ("Toronto would be safer with a camera on every corner"), that, well, supported the claim made in the article's title.

When Christopher Skinner was killed on the weekend, one of the first things police did was look for security-camera video of the crime. Mr. Skinner, 27, who was engaged to be married to his boyfriend and planning to go to law school, was downtown at about 3 a.m. Sunday when he got into an altercation with two men. Police believe the men knocked him to the ground, got into their black SUV and ran him over – a despicable crime if there ever was one.

What police desperately need is evidence that would help them identify the men or their vehicle. If this were London, England, where thousands of CCTV, or closed circuit TV, cameras monitor public spaces, they might have it by now. But Toronto police have exactly 23 – yes, 23 – CCTV cameras. So, instead, police are going from store to store in the area around Adelaide and Victoria Streets, hoping a private security camera picked something up. So far, all they have is fragmentary images of Mr. Skinner walking on the street before the crime and of the SUV leaving the scene, but nothing on the crime itself.

The Skinner case makes a powerful argument for putting many more CCTV cameras on city streets. Stacy Gallant, the homicide detective investigating the murder, says he would like to see them on every corner, not just in the rowdy downtown entertainment district but in other high-risk parts of town. He calls them an “invaluable” crime-fighting tool. Even if they don’t capture the actual crime, they can help police build a timeline of what happened when, identify potential witnesses and corroborate or rebut evidence later given in court.

[. . .]

CCTV is no panacea. It isn’t likely to work in spread-out areas – say the troubled Malvern district – where you would need thousands of cameras to cover the turf. In Britain, which has more than four million CCTV cameras, evidence is mixed about how successful CCTV is at actually deterring crimes, as opposed to solving them after the fact. “Like every tool, it has to be used at the right time and the right place,” says Toronto Police Staff Sergeant Mark Barkley, who helps oversee the CCTV effort. “Cameras do not replace police officers; they support them.”

Then, of course, there is the whole issue of privacy. Opponents of CCTV say it is taking us toward an Orwellian world where the state can follow our every move. While it’s healthy to worry about Big Brother, those fears are overblown.

And in fact, Toronto is getting 15 more cameras. The start of a trend? Who knows? I suppose that at this stage I may as well just see if I can use one of the surveillance cameras that might--or might not--appear for videoblogging.