NO JUSTIFICATION FOR POLICE CLAIM THAT CAMERAS CAUSE DROP IN CRIME

Post-9/11 Paranoia Threatens Our Dignity As Free Citizens

At the height of his academic celebrity, the late French philosopher
and social critic Michel Foucault claimed that modernity's form of
society might be characterized as one of "surveillance," from public
health institutions to the criminal systems, right down to the
classrooms in public and private schools. Foucault was using
"surveillance" not so much to denote a real camera-type of
surveillance, but more along metaphorical lines to describe how
modernity's specific mode of discourse places constraints on what we,
as modern subjects, can say, do or think.

His central claim was that the specific type of legal and political
rationality that parades as moral justification must be conceived as a
strategy on the part of hegemonic institutional power in the attempt
to effect disciplinary power over subjects. Such forms of "knowledge,"
Foucault proclaimed, are always enmeshed in power relations.

Foucault's metaphor seems apropos given the recent suggestion that
(real) camera surveillance of Whyte Avenue would significantly reduce
crime in the historic shopping and entertainment district of our city
("Police Want to Keep Cameras Rolling" Journal, April 1). City police
claim that the four cameras that were installed along the avenue in
last year's "pilot project" succeeded in reducing crime by 14 per cent
during the Fringe Festival compared with the previous year, seemingly
a justification for installing permanent camera surveillance. It
doesn't take a quantitative sociologist to figure out that perhaps
there just weren't as many criminal incidents during the Fringe as
compared to 2002. In other words, there is no way to measure the exact
effect camera surveillance had on the number of incidents at that time.

To be sure, the cameras that "helped police spot a pistol-wielding
suspect, nab a car thief in the act and search for a lost boy later
found at home" seems to justify their use. And it is a fact that
summer festivals draw out more "enthusiastic" individuals and crowds.

The idea of permanent surveillance, however, is troublesome. Ours is a
society that is ostensibly a freer one; yet, as citizens, we are
increasingly subject to an Orwellian, surveillance-like existence.

Our fundamental rights as citizens run the risk of being compromised
by the type of surveillance proposed here. It is not so much that the
majority of us have anything to hide but, the point is: it's our
nothing to hide. Some would argue that it is not only law enforcement
that has a duty to prevent crime; we all have an obligation to be on
the lookout for pistol-wielding individuals who would disturb the
tranquility of our community.

That much may be true. But, at the same time, we must not run the risk
of falling into a post-9/11, U.S. paranoia-like mentality if we are to
retain our sense of dignity as free citizens with basic human rights.

We enter into a "social contract" with the legal and political system
in which we give over certain freedoms in exchange for basic
protection. But, when that "protection" becomes arbitrary, the social
contract is broken.

In his novel 1984 George Orwell describes a scenario according to
which the belief that we have complete freedom and privacy is a
dangerous fallacy.

It is a scenario in which we, as citizens, are under constant
surveillance for our own "protection": the point being that the same
technologies that grant protection also have the capacity to harm and
enslave, particularly at the level of inalienable rights and freedoms.

In Foucault's critical imagination, such surveillance summons a danger
to our very existence as human beings.

Whyte Avenue is not crime free by anyone's measure.

But, then again, should the average person be subjected to
law-enforced infringements upon freedom of movement and privacy, in
spite of the fact that we are subject to public scrutiny the minute we
leave the confines of our homes?

Twenty years ago, such a proposal would have met with incredulity even
from the more ardent advocates of public safety.

Today, it seems that the adage "everywhere we go, there we are"
applies.

Fittingly, this year marks the 20th anniversary of Foucault's death.