Assignment 5: Surveillance and Law Enforcement

Cameras: The Good and the Bad

Listen, I'm no Big Brother but I do believe cameras stationed in major population centers are a good thing. People are really stupid (and you can't fix stupid with duct tape, as my grandma would say!) and I believe that cameras can do more good than bad when in the right place at the right time.

Now hear me out; cameras and microphones everywhere isn't a good idea. George Orwell's iconic novel, 1984, is the idea of a perfect dystopia. A place where the authority figure is in complete control over the populace and any thoughts against this authority results in the removal of troublemakers. Fahrenheit 451 is another classic novel set in a dystopia which heavily relies on government surveillance. No one wants this sort of surveillance.

The Ring Video Doorbells are a step in the right direction for the future. Not only can they catch a thief and other no-good people in the act of crimes, but they can also unintentionally catch crimes that would normally occur without any sort of video evidence. For example, I've embedded a video below of a man being robbed on his front porch. Without the Ring Doorbell, the criminals may not have been identified as easily by the man, and little proof would be available to the police in search of the criminals.

Not only are cameras very useful at private residences, public places need them just as much. An elementary school gym teacher is currently undergoing a court trial about his interactions with children as young as six years old while conducting a gym class. The likelihood of these young children coming forward to their parents or other adults are slim considering the nature and thinking of young children. The surveillance camera in the gym may have saved a lot of children.

Surveillance can also be used in a negative way, though much less common. For one thing, the technology can be abused by those in authority positions, specifically law enforcement who have access to camera feeds and databases. These abuses are mostly along the nature of spying on susceptible targets to blackmail, such was a case in 1997 when a police officer in Washington, D.C. used security cameras to target and blackmail gay couples, with whom he tracked down by reading license plates outside of a gay club. You can read more about liberties that are intruded upon by CCTV here.

If we can move past the bad, we can have something really good. That goes without saying, for just about everything.