As my collaborator in Rio de Janeiro, Paola Barreto Leblanc, points out to me, it isn’t just the police (see previous posts here and here) who have been installing surveillance cameras in the favelas. Accoring to UOL, in September 2008, the military police found a whole clandestine CCTV system of 12 cameras, and a control room hidden behind a false wall, in Parada de Lucas, a favela in the Zona Norte of the city. The cameras covered all the entrances to the favela. The system was allegedly operated by a drug-trafficking gang but since the room was, according to the reports, destroyed in the police attack, and no one was captured, it is hard to verify the story… however it is not surprising that a major illegal commercial operation would seek to have early warning of police (and other gang) raids in this way. Indeed, this system may well have been the reason why no traficantes were caught in the raid in question. From the interview we did earlier in the year, it seems clear that the favelas have intense human surveillance systems of mutual observation, whether they are gang-controlled, community-controlled or police-‘pacified’ morros. Very little goes on in the crowded informal settlements that almost everyone will not know about. Of course, the nature of the power-structure within the favela will determine to whose benefit such knowledge works. CCTV in a context like this can be seen as a sign of insecurity and weakness. Perhaps the Parada de Lucas gang felt that they were losing their grip, and the cameras in Santa Marta installed by the military police certainly seem to indicate a lack of trust in the community and the civil pacification measures – investment, infrastructure development, regular meetings and confidence-building – so far undertaken.
Category: crime
Surveillance image of the week 2: camera catches man stealing camera
Just how postmodern can contemporary surveillance get?
Well, after the irony of numerous recent CCTV thefts in the USA – after all, if you’re going to put lots of shiny new cameras up in public places they are bound to be a target themselves – now another layer has been added in Bakersfield, California, with a video surveillance camera thief caught on the camera system he was stealing. Of course, some thieves don’t seem to realise that the camera isn’t the place the data is stored… either that or they just aren’t put off by CCTV at all. Say it ain’t so…
UAE plans DNA database of entire population
Police in the United Kingdom have recently been forced by the European Court of Human Rights to scale back their increasingly large National DNA Database (NDNAD), which previously potentially included DNA profiles of anyone arrested by the police, whether charged with any offence or not. This at least shows that there is some recourse to law and and a higher authority that will protect the rights of citizens against the extension of state power… in reasonably democratic Europe at least.
However authoritarian regimes need have no such concerns. The Persian Gulf state of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has decided that it is to create a national DNA database of the entire resident population. According to The National newspaper, this will not even need any kind of debate or even new legislation. They estimate that this will take up to 10 years if population growth is factored in.The paper claims this will be the world’s first such comprehensive database, but this is only partly true. Iceland, Sweden and Estonia have all set up comprehensive DNA databases run by their health services. But the UAE’s certainly appears to be the first attempts at a comprehensive law enforcement DNA database.
DNA pioneer, Sir Alec Jeffrys, has his doubts of course. But learned critique, or opposition or overt resistance are probably all largely irrelevant to the UAE government. However, if there is to be a roadblock, it may be the economy: the UAE’s population is made up to a great extent of temporary foreign workers of all skill levels and occupation types, and the economy depends largely on the willingness of such workers to continue to come to the UAE. Whilst those at the bottom may feel they have little choice, those at the top may decide that such a policy would make the difference between them coming to and investing in the UAE, or not. The second article claims that ‘visitors’ will be exempt, but not ‘residents’. How this plays out remains to be seen. I have no doubt that the UAE will give in to the pressure of global wealth and find some way of exempting rich foreign residents, whilst making absolutely sure that poor immigrant workers are the first to be sampled.
Kabukicho Renaissance?
Kabukicho is a place that is hard to love. A seedy, crime-infested dive full of ‘massage parlours’, ‘aesthetic salons’, ‘image bars’ and other thinly-disguised forms of brothel. Tokyo has had red-light disticts since the Edo period, of course, and the Yoshiwara was only the most famous. Shinjuku was always one of them, and since the failure of the threatre initiative that gave the neighbourhood its name, Kabukicho has been the best known. Kabukicho is interesting though for many reasons. It had a radical political and cultural history in the 60s and 70s. It was the epicentre of changes that occurred in organised crime in the 80s and 90s, with Chinese gangs replacing the Yakuza as the biggest ‘threat’. And it is now the centre of efforts by the Shinjuku authorities to clean up its image, with the Kabukicho Renaissance policy, and the new Town Manager, and by Tokyo police to crack down on illegal immigration.
Controlling the outsiders
One of the most interesting meetings we had in our last week here in Japan was with two representatives from the Japan Civil Liberties Union (JCLU) and the association to defend the rights of foreign migrant workers. One thing that has always been clear to me from being a gaikokujin (or more casually, just gaijin – foreigner) in Japan is how distinct is this status. I’m a white, western European and therefore at the top of the list of acceptability in foreigners in Japan, but even so I’ve had some interesting experiences, including having two police squad cars and 5 officers deal with the matter of my ‘suspicious’ bicycle (an experience that practically all resident foreigners have had at one time or another), and just the other day I was stopped at the train station by two plain-clothes police officers, who started off quite strong, but then backed down and started mumbling apologies about ‘looking for someone’ when they realised my (Japanese) wife was just behind me. It was pretty obvious that they were conducting an immigration sweep – i.e. just stopping anyone who ‘looked foreign’ to check their immigration status.
This gave me just a tiny taste of what life can be like here for those whose immigration status is problematic. And, as the campaigners told us, this is an increasing number of people who have come to Japan because of the wealth and opportunities and because, whisper it, Japan needs immigrants. Like so many advanced industrial nations, Japan is a hyper-ageing society, with an increasingly unbalanced population pyramid. There are not enough working age Japanese people to support the increasing number of retirees, and government schemes to encourage people to have more children simply haven’t worked. The problem is that successive Japanese governments have refused to recognise the implications. The rules now make provision for ‘skilled’ immigrants, but not for those who are ‘unskilled’ and it is actually those in this latter category that Japan needs. In practice this is demonstrated by the increasing numbers of foreign delivery and construction workers in Tokyo as well as those working in the shadier areas of the ‘night economy’ – doormen, bar staff, masseurs, prostitutes etc.. The same politicians who deny the need for immigrants are probably having their personal ‘needs’ serviced by Filipino or Vietnamese women and this hypocrisy colours all the mainstream political debate about the place of foreigners in Japan, especially in Tokyo where Mayor Ishihara has never disguised his nationalist views in this area.
So, whilst the politicians refuse to deal with reality, the police are enforcing the law as it is. We have spent some time, whilst we are here (and I have gathered data on previous visits) in the night city of Kabukicho in Shinjuku. This time I was taken out to bars in the old post-war neighbourhood of Golden Gai by Professor Tonoma, who formerly led both Shinjuku-ku and Tokyo city planning bodies, and we also talked to Shinjuku community safety officers, and to the Kabukicho Town Manager, who runs the day-to-day operations of the body trying to improve Kabukicho’s image, Kabukicho Renaissance.
Kabukicho of course is famous as the first place that the Tokyo police installed CCTV, ostensibly to deal with Chinese gangs, but according to what we learned from these visits and from talking to the campaigners, as crime has declined (as it has nationally – it’s probably nothing to do with the cameras), the cameras and intensive policing (raids etc.) have been used largely to curb illegal migrant workers. And the authorities seem to make no distinction between the gangsters and the mainly South-east Asian women who work in the bars and massage parlours. They are all visa-overstayers. There is no attempt to treat the women as people in need of help and support at all. Of course this all inflates the crime figures and makes it easy to paint what the police always term ‘foreign crime’ (whatever the exact nature or seriousness of the crime) as a growing threat, as it becomes proportionally a larger part of shrinking crime rates (which were already low by global standards to begin with).
Now there is a new threat to this already massively targeted population. The inclusion of foreigners on the jyuminhyo (residents’ registry), combined with the digitisation and networking of this registry through juki-net, means that the authorities will be able to correlate residency and immigration status much more easily – the residency information for foreigners will be linked to the Houmusho (Ministry of Justice), which has entry records, and now fingerprints and facial photos too, following post-9/11 reforms. Of course, resident skilled foreigners wanted to be in the residents’ registry. They argued that not being on it was itself a form of discrimination and meant further difficulties in terms of things like buying property. However the inclusion of foreigners now opens up new forms of discriminatory practice against those who are already the most disadvantaged in Japanese society, the kinds of foreigners who more high-status ‘official’ foreigners do not generally recognise as kin to them at all.
Japan’s surveillance society, like most, is therefore a profoundly uneven one. Every society has its Others, and surveillance is deployed both to distinguish those Others and to control them. In each of the cities I have been studying the Others are different populations. In London, the Others are (at the moment) the resident Muslim community (or more particularly, ‘radicalised’ young Muslims). Here the surveillance combines repression and ‘caring’ programs to bring the disaffected back into the mainstream. In Rio de Janeiro, the Others are the urban poor, the favelados. They are largely simply excluded – walls protect the rich in their homes, and now walls are being built around the poor communities. In Tokyo, the Others are foreigners, but there are gradations of Otherness, and effectively still aping the western ‘scientific racism’ that it acquired during the Meiji period modernisation at the end of the nineteenth century, Japan’s Others are poor Blacks and Asians (for many on the right here, the Japanese are not ‘Asian’ at all, but something unique). Just as the British state is struggling with the legacy of its particular colonial and post-colonial approach to immigration, and the Brazilian state with a history of years of differentiated citizenship, the Japanese state has still not yet really come to terms with the prospect of the mixing of people at all.
Community Safety in Suginami
Following our meeting with the Mayor the other day, we went back to Suginami-ku to talk to the community safety people, who are part of the Disaster Management section. Suginami is interesting because, as far back as 2004, it was the first Local Authority in Japan to introduce a special bohan kamera jourei (security camera ordinance) which is based in part at least on principles of data protection and privacy. And until neighbouring Setegaya-ku introduced their own ordinance last year, they were, so far as I know, the only such authority. The ordinance followed public consultation which showed that although people generally thought CCTV was effective (95%), a significant minority of 34% were concerned about privacy, and 72% thought that regulation was needed. These figures seem to be significantly more in favour of privacy and regulation of CCTV than the nationwide survey done by Hino Kimihiro, however he asked different questions leading to answers that are not directly comparable.
Suginami is one of the areas of Tokyo that has the other kind of CCTV system introduced by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police after 2002, help points where people press a button if they feel in danger and speak to someone from the police. The help points have both CCTV camera and an alarm / red flashing light if the caller says it is an emergency.
However the Suginami community safety officers said that these cameras have not proved very effective and in fact they cause a lot of problems, because children tend to press the button for fun, and run away – meaning that there are many false alarms.
Suginami has some of the same kind of array of ‘blue-light’ volunteer patrols as Arakawa-ku. In Suginami, there is a fleet of mini-patoka (mini patrol cars) and motorbikes, used by 15 retired police officers. These are mainly about visibility leading to deterrence and increased community confidence, as the volunteers ex-officers have no special powers nor do they carry side-arms or handcuffs or any other conventional ‘police’ equipment. Suginami does not have the small community safety stations like Arakawa-ku, although they do also have the same problem of local koban (police boxes) being closed. However where Suginami really stands out is in the sheer number of volunteers they have involved in their community patrols, organised through the local PTAs, shoutenkai (shopkeepers’ associations) and choukai (community associations). There are 140 groups with 9600 people actively involved in one way or another in community safety just in Suginami.
Suginami is a relatively wealthy ward and the kinds of problems that concern Arakawa (mainly minor street crime and snatch-thefts) are not such big issues here. The main concern in this ward seems to be burglary and furikomi – the practice of gangsters and other criminals calling old people and pretending to be a relative or representative of a relative and persuading them to transfer money to a particular ATM (which you can do in Japan – it would be impossible in the UK). Furikomi is a very interesting phenomenon in that it seems to be a product of family, social and technological changes. Many older people who would have lived with family in traditional Japanese society are now living alone. They are lonely and miss the intimacy of family contact, so they tend to welcome unexpected calls from relatives who may now be living almost anywhere in Japan. These older people are also technologically literate and able to use mobile phones, ATMs and computers. The combination of this technological skill, dispersed families, and psychological vulnerability makes for a ripe target for fraudsters, and Suginami estimate that 40% of all crime in the ward is some form of furikomi.
In many ways, increasing concern for privacy is also a product of this change in lifestyles and family structure, as well as building techniques – western-style walls and better sound insulation mean that you can’t always know what is going on in the next room anymore, let alone in your neighbours’ apartments or houses. This also makes burglary rather easier, as once the thief has got past the initial walls or doors, no-one can hear or see very much. The intense and intimate ‘natural surveillance’ that used to characterise ordinary Japanese communities is disappearing. But the Suginami community safety officers see the possibility of revitalising such natural surveillance, and protecting privacy, without going down the route of impersonal, technologically-mediated surveillance. In many ways, this is quite heartening – if, of course, you are of a communitarian mindset. Such supportive, mutually monitored and very inward-looking communities can be stifling to those who do not fit and exclusionary to those from outside… and, not coincidentally, one of our last interviews was with a leading support group for foreign migrants in Japan, who have a very different perspective on all of these developments. That will be in my next post, which may not be until Saturday as we’re going off to Kansai for a couple of days…
(Thank-you to the Disaster Management section for their time and patience).
Vehicle tracking in Japan: N-system
Back in February, I reported from Brazil about the progress of a proposed RFID-based vehicle tracking system, SINIAV. Of course RFID is not at all necessary for tracking. In the UK, the police have used Automatic Numberplate Recognition (ANPR) systems based on roadside cameras since 1993 in London – following the Provisional IRA bombings of the City and Docklands (see the account in my erstwhile collaborator, Jon Coaffee‘s book, Terrorism, Risk and the City – and since 2005, this has been in the process of being expanded into a nationwide network (see also the official Press Release from the Association of Chief Police Officers concerning the launch here).
What is rather less well-known to the outside world is that Japan developed such an automated camera system far earlier, from the early 1980s. The so-called N-system thereafter was gradually expanded to cover almost all major expressways and strategic urban locations in Tokyo and Osaka. Kabukicho, the entertainment district in Shinjuku, which I have spent some time studying over the last few years and will write about more tomorrow, is surrounded by N-system cameras and it is, I estimate, impossible to drive into this area without your license plate being recorded. These cameras are in addition to the 50 CCTV cameras that cover just about every street within the district. N-system is supposed to have played a major role on snaring suspects from the apocaylptic cult, Aum Shinrikyo, which carried out the Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo underground in 1995, and who also assassinated top policemen and judges. Aum, now renamed ‘Aleph’, has been under official state surveillance ever since.
The Japanese police are not very forthcoming about N-system, let alone the details of how long data is kept and what it is used for. However one particular lawyer’s office in Tokyo did a very good investigation of the constitutional, legal and practical aspects of N-system back in the late 90s, and the updated pages are available here, including a nice little animation explaining how the system works.
We will hopefully be talking to them before we leave Tokyo. We still have time for a few more interviews here including the East Japan Railways security research lab, the Japanese consumers’ association, the organisation for the welfare of foreign workers, and the Suginami ward community safety people. And I will also just about have time to shoot down to Kobe to talk to Professor Kiyoshi Abe, a friend and collaborator, who is also one of the leading surveillance researchers here.
The new Japanese ‘jury’ system
The Guardian Comment is Free site asked me to do a (very quick) comment piece on the new Japanese ‘jury’ system and it’s now online here. I had to cut my original down to around 600 words and they edited it a little more to fit, and added an awful photo (where on earth they got it I am not quite sure…). Here’s the full version…
Disorder in the Court
Japan’s courts are not usually the subject of massive popular interest in the country. Salacious details of criminal cases fill the pages of the popular weekly magazines and provide fodder for cheap TV shows, but the court system itself is seen as distant, formal and, above all, dull.
The courts have long been seen as a a rubber-stamping exercise for cases already decided by confession in police cells. Japan’s 95% confession rate has been attributed to a cultural sense of shame, or to the thorough and minutely detailed dossiers of public prosecutors, but according to Amnesty International, the psychological pressure of up to 23 days of isolation and constant questioning (not to mention intimidation and physical violence) might provide a better explanation. In recent years, the issue of coerced confessions has been increasingly recognised in Japan, and the most recent example was the freeing in June this year of Toshikazu Sugaya, a man who DNA evidence has now shown could not have been guilty of the killing of a 4-year old girl, a crime that he confessed to in police cells and of which he was consequently convicted of in 1990.
Added to this is a growing feeling that the courts were too remote from people. So in 2004, a new law was passed to introduce a new method of adjudication for some criminal trials beginning in May 2009. Now the first trial using this new system, a case of murder involving elderly neighbours, has just started in Tokyo. Some have characterised this saiban-in as a ‘jury’ system, but it is actually a ‘lay-judge’ system. Whereas in the UK, twelve ordinary people are called by the courts to hear evidence and make a judgement on the guilt of the accused, in the new Japanese system six citizens join three professional judges. They not only hear evidence, but are also able to question witnesses and help decide the sentence. Verdicts are majority decisions but have to include at least one of the professional judges.
It seems an onerous task. So it is not surprising that many who were originally short-listed for lay-judge duty but did not make the final six for the first trial, are relieved to have escaped not because, as is so common in the UK, they found it inconvenient, but because of the burden of responsibility they felt. This has particular cultural components. Strongly-stated opinions and absolutes are not favoured in Japan, and people like to keep options open. The selection process itself was remarkably complex and involved summoning an initial 100 candidates, some of which were excused on grounds of infirmity or age, and more were then deselected after detailed questioning on their views and attitudes. Even court officials are now admitting that they may have overdone it.
But why this particular, strange, hybrid system? The answer is that it had form. Japan had an almost identical system from 1928 to 1943. During the Taisho period that saw a brief flowering of a more democratic culture in Japan, progressives had tried to introduce a full Anglo-American style twelve-person jury, however, judges, and conservative and nationalist politicians opposed this initiative and forced a compromise: the saiban-in system.However according to research by Takashi Maruta, the lay-judges still actually challenged the professional judges in many serious cases refusing to accept the confession and dossiers of evidence and preferring to rely on oral testimony of the accused and witnesses in court. Even in its compromised form such a volatile system offended traditionalist judges (who like many state representatives saw their power as deriving from the Emperor and therefore ultimately, divine sources), lawyers and was hardly suited to the militarist regime that gained control in the 1930s, and was eventually stopped.
But opposition seems rather different this time around. In the UK, civil libertarians have been fighting to defend jury systems, but in Japan civil liberties arguments have been marshalled by protestors against the new system. Opponents argue that the selection process violates privacy by forcing citizens’ personal views to be exposed, and is also authoritarian because citizens cannot refuse to serve unless they have health reasons. Some have even likened the system to a lynch-mob, because of course Japan still uses the death penalty.
However dig deeper, and underlying these arguments are reactionary and conservative concerns and the once-again rising influence of nationalists, in other words very similar conditions to those of the late 1920s: defence of the ‘professionalism’ of judges, and the arguments about the quasi-sacred integrity and necessary distance of courts from popular influence. More generally though, even though this system is the result of a bill passed five years ago, it seems part of an air of populist desperation from the increasingly unpopular ruling Liberal Democratic Party that faces defeat for the first time in decades in the general election at the end of this month.
However, if nothing else, the controversy over the system has excited Japanese people about the court system, and not just in bloody tales of murder and mayhem, and whatever happens in the future, any disorder in the court that results in interest and engagement in criminal justice has to be a good thing.
At the Tokyo Metropolitan Police HQ
We had an enlightening interview, which will give me much to analyse later, with three senior officers from the Seikatsu Anzen Bu (literally, ‘Everyday Life Safety Division’) of the Keisicho (Tokyo Metropolitan Police). Interestingly, this division that was created as a result of the Seikatsu Anzen Jourei (Governor Ishihara’s 2003 Tokyo Metropolitan Government ordinance) and which deals with all the community security and safety initiatives, including CCTV, is separate from the Chiki Bu (the community division) that is responsible for the koban neighbourhood police box system.
Like almost everyone in authority we have met here, the police were convinced that they were not doing surveillance in using the cameras. They also confirmed that almost all of the CCTV systems operated by shoutenkai (shopkeepers’ associations) are not monitored and are simply recorded. They also stressed their deep concern for privacy and the rights of citizens and said that data from the police-operated cameras – of which there are around 150 in Shinjuku (the largest system with 50 cameras in the Kabukicho entertainment district), Shibuya, Ikebukuro, Roppongi and Ueno – was only kept for 7 days unless there was a specific reason to retain it. This is a legal requirement not just a police guideline. The police cameras are monitored both in local stations and in a central control room, but we were told that it was strictly forbidden for us to visit (unlike every other city in which I have done research) as everyone who enters has to be pre-enrolled in the police iris-scan security database.
We talked a lot about the history of the development of CCTV and of community safety initiatives in Tokyo, and Governor Ishihara’s absolutely central role in backing video surveillance became very clear (it’s a shame he has so far refused an interview with us!). What was also particularly interesting was that the police themselves did not think that apparently obvious ‘trigger events’ were as important as it might seem. For example, they claim that the police only really began considering the use of CCTV cameras not after the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo underground but because of the influence of G8 summit security. One officer specifically mentioned the Gleneagles summit (which was just starting when terrorists attacked the London transport system), but this was in 2005, well after the TMG had already introduced CCTV, and after which the Tokyo police have not introduced a lot more cameras. So I don’t quite understand their point. It may become clearer once I have the complete transcripts… They also claimed that it was the Tokyo police rather than Japan Railways themselves or the Tokyo Metro authority who insisted on installing CCTV in the Tokyo transport network after the Aum attacks.
The officers talked a lot about community involvement. They dismissed the objections to their public space CCTV systems for several reasons, not least as I have already mentioned that they were not doing ‘surveillance’, but more importantly because they claimed to have done extensive consultation with local community groups, businesses etc. The claimed that they could not do anything without this support. This may have been true for Kabukicho, which was undoubtedly afflicted by an influx of Chinese gangs in the 1990s, but we heard from the local government of another ward that is being lined up for one of the new volunteer-based child safety camera systems being introduced from 2010 that they were given no choice by the police, and that local people were not happy about it. The problem is that this local authority don’t want to be interviewed further about this as they are in a rather delicate position over this new system.
(Thank-you very much to the officers from the Seikatsu Anzen Bu for giving us their time)
Community Safety in Arakawa
Far from the skyscrapers and bright lights of Shinjuku, where we had our last interview on community security and safety development (anzen anshin machizukuri), Arakawa-ku is a defiantly shitamachi (‘low-town’ or working class) area to the north-east of Tokyo just north of Ueno and outside the Yamanote-sen JR railway loop line that has for much of the last 40 years defined the boundaries of the richer parts of the city.
Bordering the Ara river and split by the Sumida river, it was traditionally a marshy place liable to flooding. It was also a place with a large buraku (outcaste) population and Minowa (in the north of the ward) contains the mournful Jokan-ji (or Nagekomi – ‘thrown-away’) temple, where prostitutes who died in the Yoshiwara pleasure district were cremated. The place has been hit hard by disaster. It was levelled twice in the the Twentieth Century, first by 1923 Kanto daishinsai (Great Kanto Earthquake) and then again by the firebombing in the last years of WW2.
Nevertheless, its rough, industrious, hardworking spirit has continued, and these days, despite the march of secure manshon (high-rise housing) down the post-war avenues, it remains a place full of small industrial units, especially recycling businesses and clothing wholesalers and manufacturers in Nippori, small bars and family restaurants, and lots of ordinary housing, even some of the last remaining dojunkai (early concrete public housing) constructed after the earthquake. It’s also the starting point of the last remaining tramway (streetcar line) in Tokyo, the Toden Arakawa-sen. I like it a lot and it’s where my wife and I have lived in Tokyo in the past, and where we still stay when we return (there will be more pictures in a later post).
It was natural then to turn our attention to the place as a case-study area, mainly because it is so different from Shinjuku and the other areas that have gained so much attention from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s recent initiatives. We met with three officials from the Community Safety section of the local administration: the boss and two guys who had been seconded from the city police and the fire service respectively. The boss was full of enthusiasm for the direction that Arakawa-ku has taken, which although they don’t use the term ‘machizukuri‘ is far more about real community involvement than some places that do.
Arakawa has no comprehensive CCTV strategy, although the police do consult with the developers of large new buildings on its installation. That’s not to say that they don’t have a certain degree of ‘CCTV envy’ of those places with the latest high-tech gadgets that Arakawa can’t afford, but they are not dazed by the glamour of cameras and are realistic about both the limitations of CCTV and the appropriateness of such systems for their city. Instead they concentrate on using and enhancing the natural surveillance capacities of the local communities. They make a great deal of use of volunteers, retired police officers and ordinary local people, who do their own patrols, including the delightful wan-wan (‘woof-woof’) patrol which, judging from the posters, involves mainly older female residents and very small dogs! Participation in the various community initiatives is encouraged through the use of techniques like professional rakugo (traditional comic monologue) performances in schools and community centres. They also run community patrols in miniature versions of police patoka (patrol cars), which not only look more friendly but unlike the US-style police cars can get through much narrower streets.
However these diverse community projects are being stitched together in quite an innovative way, with the use of small anzen anshin sutashion (security and safety stations), which are a bit like community versions of the police koban, the miniature two-person police boxes which dot the city. Indeed the officials referred to them as minkan koban (‘people’s koban’). These small help stations, staffed mainly by ex-police don’t just provide ‘security’ information, they also deal with social security in the broader sense, offering help for older people with benefits, for example. In almost all cases, they have replaced koban that were closed by the police. So one could argue that this is essentially the local authority being forced to pick up the bill for services that used to be provided by the police and at the same time is actually losing real police service. However, the strategy overall is a valiant attempt to make ‘community safety’ less an issue of exclusionary security and more one of inclusivity and community development, more a natural and intimate part of everyday life that does not involve new forms of external control.
Of course, crime isn’t really a massive issue here anyway. Arakawa has consistently had the second or third lowest crime rates of all the 23 Tokyo wards. But even since the introduction of these initiatives, crime has fallen still further from the relative high point it reached a few years ago. And hardly a CCTV camera in sight…
ubisurv 