Say "Cheese"...
Bedford Market - St Pauls Square |
Bedford Market overspill - Harpur Street |
Apparently UK citizens are one of the most watched people in the world.
We have the UK's Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, warning
that the country has become a "surveillance society"Note.
And we have a Deputy Chief Constable (even!) saying that valuable
resources are being wasted on spy camerasNote.
Seems like there's something in the order of four million CCTV cameras
in Britain, giving people a chance of being caught on film a staggering
300 times a day!
So I thought I'd do a little bit of research for myself. Took a wander down Bedford (my nearest local town) High Street to see if I could spot just how many CCTV cameras had been installed.
Now you've got to bear in mind that Bedford is a fairly small East Midlands (some would say Southern but, being a true Southerner, I'd argue with that. And even the AA agrees with me - or used to, anyway) market town, one-time county town of Bedfordshire, some forty-odd miles north of London.
Its High Street, end to end, is perhaps about a third of a mile in length (I've not precisely measured it, but that's a fairly good estimate I'd suggest) - it takes me perhaps five to seven minutes to walk its entire length. At a leisurely stroll!
Bedford High Street facing south |
Bedford High Street facing north |
And lo and behold, what do I find? No less than thirteen cameras. Nor is that allowing for the ones I may have missed. After all, I didn't want to make my sortie too conspicuous, especially as I was photographing each one (the pics here only being a representative sample).
Admittedly
many of these are privately operated. The majority appear to be installed
by, and so that they oversee, licensed premises (pubs!). According
to a close friend of mine who happens to be in the licensed trade
its a local Council requirement that the entrances to licensed premises
on Bedford High Street be monitored by CCTV.
Indeed, I only managed to spot one that was clearly not being operated
by a public house. And curiously, I couldn't see any near the entrances
to banks (the obvious location for CCTV one would have thought).
Presumably their cameras (for without doubt they deploy them) are
concealed - even more worrying!
However,
whether a given CCTV camera is operated by a local authority or a
commercial enterprise is really beside the point. The real
point is that as a country we seem somehow to have accepted the notion
of photographic surveillance and take it as the "norm".
Even I, a long-time staunch supporter of civil rights and personal
privacy issues, had not been much exercised by this trend - until
now. Like most people I suppose, I'd seen them but not really noticed
them. Where did they all spring from? When were they put up? Was it
all within the same time-frame or spread over a period of months,
or even years?
I simply don't know. But what I do know is, there suddenly
seems to be a helluva lot of them, and they're all over the place.
So,
I have to ask myself, how do I feel about being spied upon? For that's
what it amounts to.
Whilst at the present time and on a case-by-case basis one could probably
argue the benefits of each installation, its their apparently unchecked
proliferation that I find most disturbing.
And I suspect that if one were to put those "benefits" under a microscope they simply wouldn't withstand the scrutiny. But that'll be the topic for another rant. All I'm simply doing here is to report the findings of my initial, and very cursory, exploration.
What
I'd like you to do is take a stroll down your High Street,
and see just how many cameras you can spot. And then extend
that journey of discovery to the rest of your town (as I fully intend
to do in due course).
