Curly’s Corner Shop, the blog!

Giant rogues gallery to be tested.

The next time you visit South Shields town centre for a bit of shopping try this little challenge.

Count every CCTV camera that you see on the way, and on the return journey. Don’t forget the ones inside the paper shop as you pick up your copy of the “currant bun”, nor the cameras on the bus or the Metro, or in the stations. Make sure, too, that you catch the cameras hidden high up amongst the buildings, as well as the motorized units on what look like extra large lamp posts. Try and behave respectably with a good demeanour as you count, you never know who is watching you. If your tally is less than seventy-five by time you get home, then I doubt that you have been very diligent in the task.

Try not to worry too much about who is watching either, because they are there to help you and keep you safe from street crime, muggings, and general “yobbishness”. You aren’t doing anything wrong, so you have nothing at all to worry about!

That is, unless the blurry image of  your face face looks just a tad like some known criminal on the police database of mugshots (which so far has 750,000 images to make the mistake from).  Did I mention that you ought to stay on your best behaviour?

The police are also developing “behavourial matching” software to pick out odd behaviour in a crowd using CCTV picures. “That might be particularly useful in counter-terrorism or tackling street crime,” he ( Peter Neyroud) said. “The proliferation of CCTV cameras in the UK – with about one for every 14 people – means that we are now accustomed to our movements being monitored in this way and for most people this is not an issue.”

Not an issue eh? Well…………..not until the mistakes start to happen Mr. Neyroud.

In fact it’s already an issue with people like me who do not see that CCTV has had much impact at all on reducing levels of street crime, I still ask why people get robbed, mugged, stabbed, kicked to death, or just abused verbally, and all in front of the camera? I still ask why we see CCTV images in newspapers and on television of people committing crimes, weren’t they supposed to have been deterred?

I live in an over regulated, monstrously spied upon society which offers no real deterrence to crime, mediocre education, poor family values, and insufficient interaction and human exchange with it’s police forces. Your CCTV cameras only serve to make us more remote from policing, we have become complacent and no longer react with enthusiasm when a policeman asks us to give a statement.

So the proliferation of apparatus which could prove perfectly risky to my personal liberties and freedoms by a populist government of the future worries me quite a lot, thank you!