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There's no hiding place from the cameras

21/9/2016

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It was in King’s Lynn in 1987 that CCTV first officially hit the streets of Britain. It was, inevitably, an import from America, New York’s Times Square having had its first cameras installed in 1973. Not that they made a fat bit of difference to the Big Apple crime rate.

From the first, I’ve been unsure about the video surveillance of public spaces. Partly through doubts about how effective it really is in preventing crime. Partly because I’m not sure I want Big Brother watching my every move. And we have long overtaken the States to become the most-watched citizenry in the world.

Not that most people, most of the time, seem to mind. Joe Public seems to have accepted meekly the death of privacy. If he hadn’t, he would never have bought a smartphone and clicked to allow Google to track his every movement, his every message, his every photo.

Turns out, though, that as well as being a spy in the pocket the camera-phone can empower its owner. It can turn the tables by turning surveillance on the authorities themselves. And it’s in the States that this is starting to have a major effect.

Look up – if you can bear to watch, if it wouldn’t make you feel complicit – the names Philando Castile, Samuel DuBose, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Levar Jones, Walter Scott, Eric Garner. Just a few of the 20-odd victims of filmed police violence that has turned up online in the past three years.

Black men – in Tamir’s case, a 12-year-old boy – attacked for little or no reason by white police officers. Caught in the act of such crimes as having a missing number-plate, a broken tail-light, waving a toy gun in an empty playground, selling untaxed cigarettes on the street.

All of them, apart from Jones and Garner, shot dead. Garner was killed by choking.

The case of Jones – the one survivor in the group – is in a way the most revealing.

Having been pulled over for not wearing a seat-belt, he was shot four times when he reached back into his car for his driving licence. But he didn’t die. He was wounded in the hip – and the officer who shot him regained composure enough to summon an ambulance and discuss with him quite calmly what had just happened.

Where but in America would a man reaching into a car be assumed to be going for a gun?

Where but in America would a cop feel so threatened in such a situation as to shoot first and ask questions later?

In none of these videos do the police show any sense of either shock or remorse at what they’ve done. Is it that they don’t feel any – because it’s all too commonplace, perhaps? Or is it that in their macho culture they have appearances, a self-image, to keep up?

And how much does that image come from watching too many movies and TV shows in which casual violence is routine, glamourised – and the cops on the front line always right? Especially those mavericks like Dirty Harry who stray violently beyond the rules.

The unjustified violence in the real-life-and-death videos is anything but glamorous. It’s messy, tacky, built on mistakes and fear. Real violence has always been like that. But the presence of cameras – CCTV, dashboard cams, mobile phones, the officers’ own body-cams – makes it harder for the perpetrators to justify.
 
 
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We live in an era of round-the-clock news, an age when it can seem almost impossible to escape from whatever the media decide to feed us. Which is a common agenda determined, in practice, by a fairly small number of editors and news editors.

Once, you had to make a decision to buy a paper if you wanted the news. These days it’s thrown at you constantly by radio, internet and television.  

In its early days, TV was not considered suitable for news. The BBC feared the temptation to seek interesting pictures would skew editorial judgement. That what was interesting or exciting to look at would prevail over what was important.

And you know what? They were right. These days the BBC’s own news channel is a 24/7 demonstration of the truth of that fear. But it’s not the only one. It’s an industry standard.

Shallow or trivial reporting spoken over a background of telegenic mayhem is always preferred to rational, objective analysis.

As for human interest – well, the words of Elvis Costello’s brilliant 1983 song Pills And Soap come back to me constantly. “The camera noses in to the tears on her face, the tears on her face, the tears on her face…”

Then there’s the wild, the wacky and the downright outrageous.

The brazen craziness of a Donald Trump may induce hysterics, cringeing mixed with disbelieving laughter. But for TV editors it triumphs every time over any clear-eyed relationship with the truth. And we all have cause to fear where that might lead.
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Cash for votes

17/3/2015

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This country is not (yet) America. One of the ways we differ is in our politics. The two systems are so different it can be difficult for either to understand the other.

Odd that both go by the name “democracy” – though exactly what that word means is hard to pin down. Try it and you’ll find it’s as flexible and elusive as a water-snake.

The way the Americans use it to justify an unjustifiable approach to foreign policy, you might think it meant capitalism. Which is odd when you think of all the countries where it’s been synonymous with communism. 

The almost religious reverence both Yanks and Brits give to money is, sadly, one of the ways we resemble them.

And there’s an interesting point in that if you ever thought democracy was… well, democratic.

US political commentators routinely assess the race to the White House on the basis of who has most cash to shell out on getting their message across. There are rules (sort of), but the sums spent on promoting the leading contenders are astronomical.

The last US presidential campaign cost about £3.7billion – that’s £12 for each man, woman and child in the land.

It’s been estimated that the 2010 general election in Britain cost about £60million – roughly £1 per head.

And if you’re looking at value for money, you could call it a triumph for Gordon Brown.

David Cameron’s Conservative campaign cost more than twice as much as Labour’s, yet they still scraped into power only with the aid of the LibDems (whose spend was a bit more than half that of Labour).

So what might that tell us about the 2015 campaign?

If cash buys votes, it should be a shoo-in for the Conservatives, who are expected to spend three times as much as Labour.

As the party of the rich, and of big business, they have much wealthier backers.

And – though you probably didn’t notice at the time – they recently changed the rules. The limit on what candidates can spend was raised by 23 per cent to a total of £32.7m.

That’s still some way short of the £78m the Tories are believed to have raised in this time of “austerity”. But it’s well beyond what Labour can afford, let alone any of the smaller contenders.

The Green Party, for example, is almost wholly reliant on what its members can chip in out of their own pockets. And most of them aren’t rich.

The green energy company Ecotricity gives the Greens £40 for each new customer who signs up. It gave Labour £250,000. And that’s small beer alongside the £2.5m other power companies have given the Tories.

Next time you see an election poster, leaflet or broadcast, stop and think who might have paid for it. And what they might hope to gain.

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America's top doc backs evidence-based policy

14/2/2015

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Some interesting appointments have been made in America lately, and not all of them are bad.
Take Dr Vivek Murthy, who was sworn in just before Christmas as Surgeon General. Or, as the US media like to put it, “America’s top doc”.
For a start, he’s only 37, which seems very young for the holder of such a key post. Even if, in that weird way Americans have of organising things, he is technically an officer in the military.
Then there’s the fact that, like me, he was born in Huddersfield, which seems an unlikely start to such a career. But then he moved to Miami at age three, got a biomedical degree from Harvard and trained as a doctor at Yale, so you could say he’s pretty well schooled in the American way.
And he looks awfully smart, in an American way, in his sharp, pristine, gold-braided naval uniform.
The pro-gun lobby, who in the USA are used to getting their way, opposed his appointment. He’s not as keen as they are on people carrying firearms around – which seems a reasonable point of view for a top doc, if not necessarily for a top military man.
He did say he wouldn’t use the Surgeon Generalship as a “bully pulpit” from which to preach gun control. Which seems like unnecessary restraint, as well as an interesting form of words.
The fact that he found it necessary to say is in itself a shocking comment on the American addiction to weaponry.
And speaking of addiction…
Dr Murthy also has interesting views on cannabis. A substance which is arguably less addictive than gun-toting, and certainly a lot less lethal.
His latest pronouncement on the matter has predictably produced a chorus of cheers on one side and boos on the other.
He says the drug “can be helpful” for some medical conditions. Which is a simple truth that ought not to be controversial (see below).
While 23 states have already legalised cannabis for medical use – and four now allow recreational use – it remains classified at the highest level under US federal law. Up there with heroin and LSD and above cocaine and crystal meth, which are much more dangerous.
But the really interesting part of Dr Murthy’s statement could apply just as well to everything else the government – any government – takes a position on.
It was this: “I think we have to use data to drive policymaking”.
In other words, he thinks politicians should take notice of expert opinion.
That policy should be based on verifiable research, not gut feelings. On facts, not instant media approval ratings. On tested science, not vested interests.
What sort of fantasy world is the man living in?
The cynic in me says: “He’ll learn”. But how much better it would be if the politicians learned from him, rather than the other way around.
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