|
|
|
|
|
Ottawa police chief calls for more surveillance cameras CBC
News More surveillance cameras should be keeping an eye on citizens in Ottawa's downtown core, says the city's chief of police. "I'm not suggesting that the police have a police-owned state where we maintain security and surveillance over our citizens," Chief Vern White told a public meeting Tuesday sponsored by Crime Prevention Ottawa. "I'm telling you that I believe it would assist the police in criminal investigations and may assist citizens who make complaints against police, possibly." Criminal lawyer Mark Ertel argued that such closed-circuit TV cameras don't deliver any real reductions in crime.
Britain, he argued, has one of the world's highest rates of common assault and other petty crimes, and those crimes have continued to grow despite an increase in CCTV cameras that now number four-million. The cameras reduce people's privacy and civil liberties, Ertel told the meeting. Carleton professor Josh Greenburg, who is conducting a publicly-funded study of CCTV cameras, said researchers watching surveillance camera operators consistently found that they focus their cameras more on some types of people than others, such as young black or aboriginal men.
|
||||
