Get a haircut and smile big!

This is crazy and scary. This community is becoming a pain in the ass to live in. I should be a cop. Then I could just sit in my car and watch camera monitors all day!

Ok so they REALLY think having cameras monitering our every moves is gonna stop crime? It will most likely still continue, only people will be more careful! What kind of city is Modesto turning into?! I've noticed how people are making such drastic efforts to protect the peace and serve people and all that.

We should have a say in what gets put up in the city we live in. We should not just have it decided by officials who probably do not even consider how we feel.

I know that I would not feel very comfortable. What if I'm reaching into my bag or something like that, and to cops watching me, I look like I am doing something bad. All of a sudden I have cop cars surrounding me and I am scare out of my mind! I am pretty sure that would happen at least once if those cameras are put up.

For all I know, the cop only wants to have the cameras up so he can sit in his cop car jacking off to women..or...omg...dare I say it...MEN!

Hahaha.

--Alan

So the answer is take away your privacy and freedoms for some perceived/alleged security or safety?

In the words of one of our great Founding Fathers:

"Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one." -Benjamin Franklin

The following article is a window into what will become if we allow this type of nonsense to happen in our city. The first is an article on Britain's 4 million camera surveilance system to watch and snoop on it's citizens and the other is an article on Chicago's big brother style surveilance grid with microphones to hear and record your conversations. Folks, this isn't about your safety, it's about control. You let them do this and they will soon have their boot stamping on your face, forever. Those words of course referenced from George Orwell's novel 1984.
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Big Brother Watches and Talks to You

NICK WATT / ABC | September 30 2006

Britain stands guard with more than 4 million security cameras, or CCTVs, as they call them over here. That's one for every 14 people in the country. The British are among the most-watched people on earth.

And now one town in the north of England has taken CCTV technology a step further.

The monitors in Middlesbrough's CCTV control room show a drunk put back a traffic cone, a vandal replace a strip light he had pulled off the roof of a pizza joint, and a smoker pick up his cigarette butt from the sidewalk.

Why did they correct their infractions? The operator in the control room spotted their actions, and a disembodied voice coming from a speaker attached to a CCTV camera stopped the offenders in their tracks. It seems to work.

Disembodied but Polite

I borrowed a bicycle and took a ride down a pedestrian street. Suddenly a slightly tinny voice rang out above me. "Can the gentleman in the brown jacket on the bike please dismount?"

I did, and the voice returned. "Thank you," it said.

The operators are very courteous. But it is shocking to be singled out and reprimanded by a voice that seems to come out of nowhere. People standing around laughed at me. The voice basically shamed me into getting off my bike.

"I don't think that form of public humiliation to get social control is the best form possible," said Clive Norris, a sociology professor at Sheffield University, and one of the country's leading CCTV critics.

But he's in an ivory tower, so to speak, and the self-described "man on the front line" in the fight against anti-social behavior is Ray Mallon, the mayor of Middlesbrough. He's a former cop -- nicknamed "Robocop" during his time on the force.

"I don't speak Italian and I don't speak Urdu," he said cryptically. "But I speak crime reduction fluently, because I've been doing it for a long time."

Mallon has attached speakers to some of the 144 cameras in his town. He calls these "intervention tools."

"Sometimes all you have to do is intervene and say to someone, 'Don't do that,'" he said.

There's a speaker to relay the orders but no microphone to pick up the replies. "This is a one-way street. The police command you. You can say nothing back," complained Norris. Although you can use hand gestures -- or worse.

Dare Anyone Complain?

"There's been too much spoken about human rights, too much about civil liberties of the wrongdoers," said Mallon. "I don't see any evidence of people in Middlesbrough complaining about this, other than a few hoodlums."

During our unscientific survey of the people of Middlesbrough, only one person complained. But she was no hoodlum. She was an elderly woman. "It's like Big Brother watching you," she said. "Not good," she added with a grimace.

Big Brother is, of course, the omnipresent voice in George Orwell's prophetic "1984." Thankfully, though, the CCTV operators in Middlesbrough work for something called the town council, not the Ministry of Truth.
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Chicago To Expand Video Surveillance System
New Cameras, Microphones To Cost $3 Million

NBC News | November 30, 2004

CHICAGO -- In Chicago, Big Brother isn't only watching you; he's listening, too. Starting in December, police will begin to install 50 new street surveillance cameras, complete with gunshot detectors like those on cameras already in place, city officials announced Tuesday. Developers say the microphones are sensitive enough to detect when a silencer is being used to muffle the sound of gunfire.

City officials are calling the safety program Operation Disruption, NBC5's Natalie Martinez reported. The program began last summer with 30 cameras set up throughout Chicago. The first cameras sent information back to officers' laptop computers in squad cars, but the expanded system will be controlled through a central command center, where retired police officers will monitor activity.

"We've integrated the gunshot detection with the video surveillance that actually electronically identifies the location and turns in the location of the gunshot, and we've integrated that with wireless technology that remotely feeds the center," said Ron Huberman, executive director of the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communications.

Authorities said the system allows police the freedom to patrol high-crime neighborhoods, where cameras are perched in bulletproof boxes atop light poles. The cameras allow instant replay and display compass information so controllers can more easily help police find victims and perpetrators of crimes.

Mayor Richard M. Daley said the camera program shows the city is paving the way for the rest of the country.

"We're so far advanced than any other city -- and sometimes the state and federal governments -- they come here to look at the technology," Daley said.

At a press conference Tuesday, Chicago leaders credited the camera system for the current 12-year low in violent crime rates and a reduction in the number of homicides.

"We've had 107 requests for the tapes from the cameras. We have inventoried over 56 usable videos," said Chicago Police 1st Deputy Superintendent Dana Starks.

The expansion to Operation Disruption will cost almost $3 million, with the funding coming strictly from money police seize from drug dealers, Martinez reported.

Like the traffic cameras, this involves money for the camera system, installers, new jobs for new monitors like the traffic light camera watch, as does that really catch the red light violators. We have several of those. Record for court, likely technicians to testify at wages to convict those caught on camera. Money. Taxpayer money. Mojo, you note tha public not involved in the say so? Perhaps, but no taxation without representation, policy has some reps called the City Council if public wishes to complain. on the other hand, nearly every one of the little stores on the corner has a surveillance camera, every AM PM, ATM machine, and also of course, we do have cameras now in our own phones for the war of the pictures in court. We're already on view, how effective is this to see we likely should mind Ps and Qs so as not to be arrested, which typically still takes a cop and cuffs, you got enough folks on camera to pick out the guilty, and mistakes still get made. But, no doubt, there is a grant for such a system, available, the hyphy thing brought it up ever more, MPD uses it as a reason to buy into it, City Council too, many other citizens often not users of downtown venues, but voters, because problems exist. Are the parking garages lit well enough, do they have camera's and is that surveillance stopping robbery there, or used in court. It smacks of Big Brother from Orwell, but some of us screw it up for we who feel we're law abiding, upset to be lumped in with them. Money. If only that would protect us.
jim