on 3 August 2007Police are to get £3m to spend on a new crime-fighting technology. No, it’s not Robo-Cop. He resigned from the force a few months back because John Reid gave him the willies. The new cash is for head-mounted cameras. And before you start giggling there at the back, they don’t have flash. They’re video cameras, and the plan is that while our boys and girls in blue go about their daily business of protecting us from the forces of evil (and meeting their quota of fixed penalty notices), they’ll also capture us on digital film.
You might think strapping webcams to coppers’ crania sounds like an ill-thought-out stunt, but you’d be so wrong: it’s been tried in Plymouth. According to users, one benefit is that ‘members of the public, and noticeably youths, show more respect’. Really? It seems a pity if the nation’s PlayStation operatives are missing the opportunities for wit and merriment presented by a member of Her Majesty’s constabulary parading around the doors with a Handycam stuck behind his ear. ‘Your missus should remind you to take that off when you’ve finished.’ ‘Send us the tape mate, we don’t get Channel Five.’ ‘Is that your third eye, Inspector Zen?’ (This on the more literate estates.)
You could sum it up as ‘Shoot first, ask questions afterwards’ An official guidance booklet explains how cameras should and shouldn’t be used, although the ‘shouldn’t’ part seems to have been rather neglected. You could sum it up as ‘Shoot first, ask questions afterwards’. The actual Executive Summary isn’t quite so pithy, featuring 23 acronyms, including a new one for the whole concept: BWV, ‘body-worn video’. They’ll need a snappier name if it’s going to catch on. PC TV? Cop-top box?
The Home Office makes the case for a national rollout with a multitude of charts that will be especially illuminating for students of witless pseudo-analytical management bumf. One graph, eschewing any scale markings, depicts the rate of ‘incident attrition’, where a crime is not brought to justice, plummeting by 85%. The actual figure appears to be 3.9%. Overall, no actual crime reduction could be shown, and while paperwork was reduced, videoed crimes took longer to be processed.
Given such ambiguous results, why the enthusiasm? Well, it seems there simply aren’t enough cameras trained on the public. In London, anti-terrorist police have been granted instant access to footage from congestion charging cameras, sweeping aside the data protection safeguards that silenced objectors when the cameras were installed. Although the BWV scheme has no connection with anti-terrorism, the Information Commissioner’s guidance on this too amounts to ‘do as you please’, and neither the Human Rights Act nor the Freedom of Information Act are deemed likely to apply.
Thus constitutionally unfettered, the headcam can go where CCTV feared to tread. ‘If a BWV user is called to attend a private dwelling, provided this is an incident that would normally be the subject of a pocket notebook entry, the officer should record the incident.’ Yes, that means inside your house. Naturally, ‘users should be mindful of the rights of individuals to respect for a private and family life under Article 8 of the ECHR’. That’s the European Convention on Human Rights, which has protected our basic freedoms since before video cameras were invented. And how exactly should this mindfulness manifest itself? ‘Officers may find that one party may object to the recording taking place. In such circumstances officers should continue to record.’
Footage of undressed suspects was released for everyone to laugh at One of the few circumstances where they shouldn’t is when ‘people are in a state of undress’. Odd, that, because when the 21/7 suspects were arrested in their skimpies, not only was footage shot, it was released for everyone to laugh at. ‘Evidence’ of this kind is increasingly made public under a protocol drafted with media executives such as ITN’s John Battle. He calls it ‘a good example of what can be achieved if a public authority is prepared to trust the media.’ Yeah, if you were making a list of issues on which you trusted the media, ‘protecting privacy’ would be right up there, just below ‘ignoring Paris Hilton’.
To hush any possible qualms, the Home Office cites the example of a domestic violence defendant who was convicted after a jury saw BWV footage of his demeanour when arrested. Shame they couldn’t find a kiddie porn case, but still, it’s a powerful example of why nobody should object to this kind of intrusion. Let’s film everything and show it to everyone! What have we got to lose?
‘It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide… To wear an improper expression on your face was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak…’
But that was 1984. In 2007, everything has an acronym. BWV: being, while videoed.
Adam Banks is thinking of having himself pixellated.
adambanksdotcom @Herring1967 "watching on screen"?! That's not a subeditor, it's a butcher with English as a third language