CAMERAS NO ANSWER TO CRIME PROBLEMS

Is Big Brother watching you? Starting May 1, and for the duration of the
summer, he will be, in the central city blocks defined by Sherbrooke, Berri
and Sanguinet Sts. and Rene Levesque Blvd. People who know Montreal will
recognize this area as a likely place to score some drugs. Which is why the
Ville Marie borough council has approved a plan to install outdoor
surveillance cameras for four months, and see what good they will do.

No one is likely to react favourably to the idea of what amounts to a giant
two-way mirror in the sky. However discreet, surveillance cameras create an
atmosphere of containment. They imply unsafe conditions even where these do
not exist. In or out of sight, they are ugly.

But those who equate public surveillance with George Orwell need to step
back, relax and ponder the realities of urban life. To walk down any public
street is, ipso facto, to surrender some privacy. You don't like being
watched? Then you had better stay at home. People-watching is part of
everyone's Montreal summer.

If you're concerned specifically about electronic surveillance you are
scarcely better off. Cameras are ubiquitous in shopping centres and other
privately controlled areas that we all regard as public. As technology
advances, these cameras promise to be harder and harder to detect. And
face-recognition software is already with us.

There is certainly potential for abuse in all such technology. Restrictions
on such tools need to be debated, established and followed.

But will these cameras reduce drug dealing? Here the evidence is mixed.
Cameras are as common as mailboxes in the United Kingdom, and the British
government continues to earmark millions for the installation of new
closed-circuit TV systems. Yet street crime in London is on the rise. Would
there be even more crime without the surveillance? Probably, but insurance
companies have noted a dispersal of urban crime to the countryside.

This phenomenon can be compared with the cleanup two decades ago of
prostitution on St. Laurent Blvd. That crackdown did not suppress the
industry, but moved it eastward into residential neighbourhoods, hardly an
improvement. Drug dealers who fear detection by downtown surveillance
cameras will not apply for honest jobs instead. They will find other places
to do their business.

The point is camera surveillance - even without considering potential legal
challenges to its use - is no substitute for flat-foot policing of the sort
that has reduced crime substantially in New York City.

Nor is surveillance likely to improve enforcement while drug laws,
particularly those related to marijuana, are as incoherent and transitional
as they are today in Canada. Until we have a clear and rigourously enforced
law that actually punishes acts we want to deter, what's the good of
cameras?

Projet Robo-Cam, as it is called, will be a pilot project. As such, it
deserves our guarded support. After the summer, let us ask the police to
explain just how the cameras make their work easier and improve our lives.