Reflecter
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 Posted: Thu Nov 22, 2007 8:28 pm Post subject: The Road to Southend Pier - Book |
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Here's an excerpt from the book 'The Road to Southend Pier' by Ross Clark that highlights the surveillance problems we face.
| Quote: | [The journey would be a dangerous one. I knew that, even before I set off from my home near Newmarket in Suffolk and began my drive towards the coast.
My mission was simple — to travel just 50 miles in our modern surveillance society without once being snapped by a CCTV camera or leaving any other trace of my trip for officialdom to detect.
At any point I might be mugged, coshed over the head and left for dead — and there would be no CCTV footage of my ordeal for the BBC's Crimewatch team to entertain their viewers with.
But on balance, this was a risk I was ready to take.
I wanted to see for myself just how much nosier Big Brother has become since the first CCTV camera was installed in Guy's Hospital, London, in 1949.
By the early 1970s, when I was growing up, their lenses were widely seen in British shops but they were still something of a novelty.
If I behaved well on shopping expeditions to Worcester as a boy, I was rewarded with a visit to Littlewoods where I was allowed to perform in front of the CCTV cameras, watching myself on the screens alongside as I did so.
Today there is nothing novel about CCTV. There are now an estimated 4.2 million cameras in use in Britain, which equates to one for every 14 people.
When the pressure group Privacy International recently surveyed the extent to which states spy upon their citizens, Britain came joint third with Russia, behind China and Malaysia.
I knew when planning my 50-mile journey that there was no point in venturing towards London, where the average citizen is caught on camera 300 times a day.
Instead, I chose a more romantic destination: the end of the pier at Southend in Essex. But travelling beneath the radar of Big Brother Britain requires surprisingly careful planning.
With both railway stations and carriages stuffed with cameras these days, it was unthinkable that I could travel by train.
Nor could I drive on any main thoroughfares, risking detection by one of the 7,500 cameras placed along British roads to monitor congestion.
I'd have to stick to country back roads — and I couldn't risk stopping for food en route. There was no telling how often my face might be captured on camera during even the briefest of dashes down a supermarket aisle.
The odd thing about this is that there's not much evidence that CCTV cameras are any good at stopping shoplifters.
In 2003, researchers at the University of Leicester sent thieves into stores to recreate the offences for which they had been convicted.
Not one was apprehended: even if they were spotted, the response from the control room was too slow to catch them.
As one volunteer noted: "I have never seen a CCTV camera jump off the wall and nick anyone."
I congratulated myself on reaching the border with Essex without a single stop, and was briefly tempted to ring my wife and tell her of my progress.
But then I remembered that, as soon as I switched on my mobile, even without dialling a number, it would start sending out signals to the nearest transmitter.
These would be sufficient to trace its whereabouts, and mine, to within 100 yards in towns and cities, or a mile in rural areas.
Thank goodness my car was built ten years ago, before satellite navigation became standard.
This has been sold on the promise that it will help us find our way around, but the little gizmo telling you to take the second left for Basingstoke could really be a spy in your car.
With the help of the right technology, it may be used by others to track your location as surely as your mobile.
As yet undetected, I continued along the back lanes of Essex until I tired of my slow progress and ventured briefly on to an A-road somewhere near Braintree.
I had gone barely a mile when I realised that I had made a potentially disastrous mistake.
There it was ahead of me: a speed camera on the grass verge.
Just in time, I dived down a side road — grateful that the cameras are painted bright yellow.
This is a sop to motorists who complain how jolly unfair it is that they have been caught.
But the result, of course, is that the devices have been rendered completely useless.
Stand near a speed camera and you see car after car braking furiously when the driver spots it, then accelerating away again 100 yards later.
The idiot who overtook me at 80mph on a blind bend shortly afterwards certainly seemed confident that he wasn't being watched — and if he was also gambling that there would be no police patrols around, then he was right.
The use of cameras has coincided with a dramatic fall in the level of other traffic policing.
Between 1999 and 2004, for example, breath-tests dropped from 765,000 to 578,000 — during which time deaths in alcohol-related accidents increased from 460 to 560.
In fact, the chances of being breathalysed while driving in Britain are now lower than virtually anywhere else in Europe.
I was still some 30 miles from Southend Pier and I checked my petrol gauge nervously.
I knew that I couldn't stop to buy fuel.
Even if I avoided using my credit card — which would leave a track of what I had spent and where — my presence could easily be noted by the numberplate-recording equipment which is increasingly common at Britain's garages.
But my biggest challenge still lay ahead.
Southend has 230 CCTV cameras and I needed a plan to combat them.
Finally, as I neared the end of my journey, the solution came to me.
One of the most damning criticisms of CCTV is that it concentrates on offences committed in public places, like town centres, and not on those perpetrated in dark alleys and private places not seen by the cameras.
All I had to do was work out where the camera's blind spots were and plan my route accordingly.
It wasn't going to be easy.
I parked my car in an unobtrusive side street and ventured cautiously towards the seafront.
This was one of the busiest parts of the town and there would undoubtedly be cameras surveying the hundreds of day-trippers milling around ahead of me.
My only chance was to sneak along the beach while the tide was out and make it on to the pier without being seen by the cameras on the front.
It seemed worth a try and I went for it. Too late I spotted the warning signs. "CCTV monitoring and recording," they read.
"Looking out for a safer community and safer roads." As if to prove the point, there it was — a camera which seemed to be looking straight down at me.
The game was up. I had failed.
My only consolation lay in discovering that I would have been thwarted even had I reached my final destination.
Yes, even at the end of Southend Pier — the longest of its kind in the world, jutting more than a mile out into the sea — there are three CCTV cameras.
As I drove back home, I wondered what Southend hoped to achieve with its network of all-seeing electronic eyes.
Just as CCTV cameras and speed cameras seem only to intimidate the innocent while failing to deter shoplifters and speeding motorists, so the evidence from towns and cities across Britain is that electronic surveillance fails to combat street crime and disorderly conduct.
Take a town like Northampton, where the CCTV network has been hugely expanded over the past five years to its current total of 495 cameras.
Over the same time, violent crimes recorded by Northamptonshire Police rose from 9,808 to 10,113.
Robberies rose from 1,015 to 1,037 and cases of criminal damage from 15,688 to 16,025.
By contrast, there was a temporary 27 per cent fall in violent incidents around Christmas 2005 when police horses were used on the town's streets to quell over-exuberant revellers.
A similar success was reported in Wrexham, North Wales, when horses were deployed between the hours of 10pm and 3am.
Incidents involving violence halved and admissions to the local accident and emergency department fell by three-quarters.
Clearly, the cavalry succeeds where CCTV does not.
But such traditional policing methods are relatively expensive and the over-reliance on electronic surveillance today is, to some extent, a product of pennypinching and laziness on the part of the law enforcement agencies.
How much cheaper, how much more comfortable and safe for those expected to do the work, that a boisterous town centre be monitored from a centrally-heated control room full of screens rather than by sending police officers out on the street.
While there are certainly cases where CCTV images have led to prosecution, the evidence suggests they are a poor substitute for human eyes and ears.
In three-quarters of cases where police produce footage in court, the evidence is ruled inadmissible — usually because the images are so grainy they don't have a hope of identifying the culprit.
And even where suspects can be clearly seen, defence lawyers are wise to the fact that CCTV evidence can be, and often is, dismissed.
Why? Because the installation of the cameras has breached the many rules designed to protect the public from overbearing surveillance!
These include the stipulation that all cameras be registered for a specific purpose such as "fighting crime".
A criminal can successfully argue, for instance, that footage of him mugging somebody should be discounted if the camera which caught him doing the deed was supposed only to be protecting property.
The extent of this problem was revealed earlier this year in a study by Camera Watch, the industry body which advises councils and the police on CCTV systems.
It suggested that 90 per cent of these devices breach either data protection or human rights legislation, making it easy for lawyers to challenge the use of footage they generate.
Few people realise it, but the Data Protection Act of 1998 allows any citizen to request a copy of CCTV images of him or herself in return for a modest fee of £10.
I decided to check out my moment of glory in Southend.
My request to Southend Borough Council seemed straightforward enough.
I had been on the end of the pier at 4.25pm on Wednesday May 16, wearing a grubby blue raincoat, and I even went to the trouble of e-mailing them a photograph of myself to help them identify the right guy.
The reply, a week later, was disappointing to say the least.
Although they did have video footage of a person they believed could be me, they explained all the relevant cameras were showing a wide view of the pier at the time — which made it impossible to be sure.
Had any suspicious behaviour been noticed, I was assured, the CCTV operators would have zoomed in to a level at which my face could have been recognised.
But what if I had acted unsuspiciously, then gone on to blow up the town hall?
If the police had looked through that afternoon's footage to find someone matching my description, all they would have got was a general view of the Thames Estuary.
The problem is that, when it comes to serious crime, CCTV simply tends to displace the surveillance to those which are not.
So far, authorities have attempted to solve this by installing more and more cameras. But where do you stop?
Well, if you imagine that your home is the last bastion of privacy, think again.
Five years ago, West Midlands Police conducted a secret trial in Coventry which involved installing tiny cameras in the houses of elderly people and frequent victims of burglaries to intercept bogus callers and thieves.
It is hard to be too critical of this initiative.
The cameras were installed with the homeowners' agreement and they did their job. But the danger, as always with this sort of experiment, lies in where such developments might take us in future.
Will it one day be regarded as normal to have hidden cameras around your home? Could it even be impossible to obtain insurance unless you consent to their presence?
Despite all this, the authorities are unlikely to take much notice of arguments against CCTV.
For them, electronic surveillance is partly about buck-passing, a way of making some kind of response to complaints over rising crime.
You want to know what they are doing about the drunken violence outside your front door every Friday night? Putting more police on the beat, perhaps? Sending round a squad car? No, they're installing CCTVs.
But deep down, they know the reality: that all this gadgetry, just like Southend Pier itself, is nothing more than a dead end. |
• Adapted from The Road To Southend Pier by Ross Clark (Harriman House, £9.99). © Ross Clark 2007. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.
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