policing – Page 9

At the Instituto de Segurança Pública

Paola and I had a very productive interview with Colonel Mario Sergio de Brito Duarte, the Director President of the Institute for Public Security (ISP) in Rio de Janeiro. The ISP is a state-level organisation with multiple functions including research on public security and the compilation of crime statistics; professional development for the police services (and also more broadly to encourage greater cooperation and coordination between military and civil police); and community involvement and participation in the development of security policy. The Colonel gave us an hour and a half of his time to explain his view on a wide range of issues around crime, security, the problems of the favelas, and the potential for surveillance, social interventions and policing in solving these problems.

As with many senior police (and military) officers with whom I have talked over the years, the Colonel is an educated, thoughtful man who has strong views based in his experiences as a front-line officer with the Policia Militar in Rio (including some years in BOPE, the special operations section) – as detailed in his book, Incursionanda no Inferno (Incursions into the Inferno). Despite how the title may sound, he was far from being gung-ho or authoritarian in his views, emphasising throughout, as with almost everyone I have talked to, that socio-economic solutions will be the only long-term guarantee of public security in Rio. And he certainly had no sympathy for the illegal actions of militias, despite understanding why they emerged and continued to be supported by some sections of the community.

However, it was also clear to him that current policies like Mayor Eduardo Paes’ ‘choque de ordem’ strategy which involves demolitions of illegally-built houses in the favelas, was absolutely necessary as well. He spent some time outlining his view of the history of how drug gangs infiltrated and gained control of many favelas, an in particular the importance of their obtaining high quality small arms – though he was vague on exactly where these arms came from – I have, of course, heard allegations from other interviewees that corrupt soldiers and policemen were one common source of such weapons.

From the point of view of surveillance studies, it was notable how profoundly indifferent the Colonel appeared to be towards he growth of surveillance, and in particular CCTV cameras. He argued that they might be a useful supplement to real policing, but he certainly did not appear to favour a UK-style ‘surveillance society’ – of which, at least in Rio, there seems little sign as yet. He was similarly indifferent towards other central state social interventions like the Programa Bolsa Familia (PBF), and initiatives like ID cards – of course they might help in some way, but he certainly made no attempt to ague, as the UK government has done, that such technology will make a big difference to fighting crime and terrorism (indeed it was interesting that ‘terrorism’ was not mentioned at all – I guess that, when you have to deal with the constant reality of poverty, drugs and fighting between police and gangs, there is no need to conjure phantasms of terror). Even so, the Colonel recognised that the media in Rio did create fantasies of fear to shock the middle classes, and that this sensationalism did harm real efforts to create safer communities.

There was a lot more… but that will have to wait until I have had the whole interview transcribed and translated. In the meantime, my thanks to Colonel Mario Sergio Duarte and to the very nice and helpful ISP researcher Vanessa Campagnac, one of the authors of the analysis of the Rio de Janeiro Victimisation Survey, who talked to us about more technical issues around crime statistics.

Tech regs, not ethics, close London CCTV

Hundreds of CCTV cameras in London will have to be shut down, but this has nothing to do with concerns over privacy, liberty or the surveillance society, it is entirely due to technical regulations.

The cameras, which are mobile road cameras owned by Westminster City Council, used for multiple tasks including anti-crime activities and protest-monitoring, but they are supposed to be for traffic regulation and as such must conform to technical standards set by the Department for Transport (DfT) -in this case, a 720 x 576 pixel picture size (analogue broadcast standard). Westminster’s are 704 x 576!

This might all seem rather petty were it not for two rather important aspects. First of all the case reminds us how surveillance introduced specifically for one area (traffic management) can creep into other areas for which they were never intended or authorized. This can also work in many directions: some of London’s congestion charge cameras were originally installed as anti-terrorism cameras after the IRA attacks of the early 90s.

Secondly, however it also shows, counter-intuitively, how weak is the regulation of CCTV in the UK. The fact is that the cameras have been stopped because of a technical infringement, and indeed there is in general an extensive and growing list of technical regulations and recommendations for CCTV issued by central Government bureaucracy, yet CCTV remains massively under-regulated when it comes to conformity with human rights and civil liberties, let alone for any consideration of the wider and longer-term social impacts of pervasive video surveillance. The closure of this system highlights the powerlessness of the British people in the face of increasingly authoritarian government, not their strength…

(Thanks to Aaron Martin for sending me this one)

The Shock of Order: Building and Demolition in Rio de Janeiro

I may have been slightly worried about the most recent drugs war that was going on as I arrived, but as usual this appears to have been exaggerated by the press who largely serve the richer, middle-class community, and who appear to want to have their fears stoked on a regular basis. The ‘war’ is a trafficker conflict that involves traffickers based in the large favela of Rocinha, who belong to the Comando Vermelho (CV, Red Command) the oldest and largest of the prison-based umbrella groups of Rio drug traffickers, attacking another favela, Ladeira dos Tabajaras, whose traffickers are backed by the ‘Amigos Dos Amigos’ (ADA, ‘Friends of Friends’). This kind of thing is happening on and off all the time, but what made it a concern of the paranoid middle class in this case, was geography: in order to get to Ladeira dos Tabajaras, the Rocinha gang had to go through the rich high-rise area of Copacabana… to say that it is exaggerated is not to say that it is not dangerous: 8 people have so far been killed, but they are all traffickers and, I believe, all killed following police raids into the favelas.

It is probably no coincidence that this display of force by the Rocinha traffickers is happening just as the city government of Rio has started to implement a policy of the current Mayor, Eduardo Paes, known as ‘choque de ordem’ (the ‘shock of order’), which involves sorties into communities like Rocinha largely to enforce planning regulations by destroying recent illegally built constructions, which are pushing the favelas even further up into the hills. In the last few days, this policy has resulted in the demolition of one particular controversial building, the Minhocão in Rocinha. This was due to start on the 17th, but was halted by a judicial decision, before going ahead in recent days.

There is more than a degree of irony here. The purpose of these demolitions is supposedly to enforce urban planning regulations and ‘protect Rio’. The Secretary for Public Order, Rodrigo Bethlem, is quoted by O Dia as saying (in my translation):

“We cannot permit an entrepreneur to come into Rocinha to build and make easy money by exploiting people. We cannot allow Rio De Janeiro to be destroyed by speculators, who want to make money without following any rules and who aim only at profit.”

Yet, I only have to glance out of my window here to see the towers of the Centro, built by wealthy speculators, which have almost completely destroyed the beautiful Parisian-style boulevards and belle epoque architecture that used to be ‘Rio’. And turning the other way, the coastline it dominate by the secure condominiums long the beaches, which I am pretty sure were not constructed out of the kindheartedness of developers, and whose development no doubt involved corruption at higher levels of urban government. Looking uphill, I can see the often dubiously if not illegally-constructed houses of the rich that cut into the edges of the National Park.

Can we look forward to the demolition of all of these disfigurements of Rio? Of course not… and the reason is obvious. The demolitions in Rocinha are about power projection. Local state policy towards the favelas goes in waves that alternate between socio-economic solutions and violent authoritarianism. For all its negative aspects, many people who are concerned with social justice here recall with some nostalgia the progressive populism of Leonel Brizola who was mayor in the 1980s. His administrations installed infrastructure, built schools and improved houses in the poorest areas.

The current administration of Eduardo Paes is taking a very different and harder line, concentrating on law and order, a stance which was laid out clearly during the Pan-American Games when the police effectively occupied several of the favelas in an Israeli-style security operation. There would be nothing wrong with this if it were backed by some kind of progressive social imagination too – some favelas like Dona Marta, which I will be visiting later this week, have apparently been transformed through a combination of strong control and surveillance with real social improvements.

Instead there are apparently plans to further marginalise favela residents by building a wall along the major highway from the international airport into the city, so that all the city’s elite can feel so much more secure, and of course, visitors will not have to even see the favelas (some or Rio’s most miserable) which line the route… there’s more than a whiff of Israeli tactics about this too. Whether by building or by demolition, urban planning seems to be currently used as a weapon against the favelas and their inhabitants.

CONTEST 2: so where do I sign up?

One massively important development back home in Airstrip One, that I somehow missed, as I am here in Brazil, was the announcement of (now officially the worst ever) Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith’s only personal Stasi – sorry, it was just terrorism preparedness training for thousands of workers. It’s easy to get confused especially as this all comes as part of a package of measures designed to counter Islamic radicalism through state propaganda. It’s all part of CONTEST 2, the sequel to the CONTEST strategy that we criticised in our recent book on urban resilience as threatening to turn all British citizens into paranoid spies – for more ridiculous rhetoric along these lines, see the Metropolitan Police poster campaigns. It’s also part of long tradition of volunteerism in British civil defence that goes back to WW2 and even before, and encompasses all that ridiculous advice on hiding behind your sofa in the event of a nuclear attack.

Backing the plan are odd individuals like Maajid Nawaz, who is a former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an extremist Islamic group, who seems to have swapped one extremism for another in his support of the British government’s authoritarian stance, in his leadership of the Quilliam Foundation. However, the Conservative Party despite their liberal words on ID cards, actually want to go further than Labour. They claim that we are ‘soft targets’ and that ‘whole community needs to be involved in tackling the danger’. They argue that this would be learning the lessons of Mumbai, but it is quite clear that Mumbai was an attack planned in one country against another, not a homegrown assault, so it seems that they are simply trying to scare us into thinking that we need more McCarthyite tactics.

My first thought about the new terrorism preaparedness training was ‘so where do I sign up? Perhaps the best thing for all critical and progressive people to do would be to sign up and do exactly the opposite of what they want… not that I would ever suggest such a subversive strategy.

Which is worse: no surveillance or incompetent surveillance?

Ok, so I know it is a provocative and incomplete question, but it’s one I am forced to ask this morning as a case in Australia, where a badly implemented video surveillance system in Sydney airport is being blamed for the failure of a court case over a brawl in which a man was killed.

According to reports, the police are quoted as saying that they were “hindered in their search for images of the alleged offenders by an outdated and fragmented surveillance system”. They claim that the four or five different uncoordinated systems in and around the airport, all with different recording locations and formats, make it difficult for them to gather evidence. When you look closer however, it does seem to be the that the only real problem relates to one of the systems which was very old and could not record from more than one of its camera simultaneously.

Although it notes that there are other ‘community concerns’ than just having complete surveillance (of course…), the newspaper seems to be accepting the objectivity of claims that this is a problem of a lack of centralisation. Fear of terrorism is as usual the motivation for this, although the unlikely occurrence of terrorist events and the fact that the incident in question is a biker brawl (i.e. a domestic gang issue) means that this link is tenuous. It also should lead one to question why such a violent disturbance was allowed to progress to the point where someone was killed in an airport. That has very little to do with poor CCTV and much more to do with a failure of more basic security and a lack of care for passengers on the ground more generally. Perhaps the real issue should whether we are becoming so reliant on technological systems of monitoring that we are forgetting the protective purpose of security and the rather more human ways in which this could be improved.

The police apparently also have eye-witnesses, so you have to wonder what the agenda is here. Is it simply a case of police frustration? Would it really help if the systems were all joined up and run centrally? Or is this just a problem with one system? Is this case being used deliberately to try to create a wave of public outrage upon which more intensive joined-up video surveillance can be implemented? I don’t know the answers, but someone in Australia should be asking rather more searching questions than just ‘why don’t the cameras work better?’

(Thanks to Roger Clarke – who does indeed ask difficult questions – for pointing out this story)

Metropolitan Police Encouraging Stupidity and Suspicion

Rather than being a legitmate political response to an illiberal, repressive, undemocratic and unaccountable growth in surveillance, ‘interest’ in CCTV is now regarded as suspicious in itself…

Boing Boing has news of the latest London Metropolitan Police campaign which is supposedly encouraging people to report their suspicions on terrorist activity, but is in fact just another step on the illiberal, socially divisive and stupid road towards a McCarthyite Britain where British people are expected to spy on each other in the name of security.

Why not check your neighbours' waste bins?

Apart from encouraging people to rifle through their neighbours garbage, the most disturbing thing about this new campaign is the way in which it implies that any interest in CCTV cameras is a potentionally terrorist activity.

See that camera? No, you don't. It's not there.

From the late 1980s onwards, the British state in its usual bumbling, piecemeal and disorganised way, gradually created an increasingly comprehensive monitoring program of British city centres. There was never any strong evidence for the need for this technology, it was never approved by parliament, there was never a single CCTV Act that enabled it.

Now, just as it has become pretty clear that CCTV has very little effect on crime rates (its original justification, let us not forget), the state has started to close down criticism and even interest in or discussion of these surveillance measures. Effectively, we are being officially instructed to ignore the cameras and pretend we don’t see them. Rather than being a legitimate political response to an illiberal, repressive, undemocratic and unaccountable growth in surveillance, ‘interest’ in CCTV is now regarded as suspicious in itself.

At the same time, the British state is increasingly regulating the means of production of visual images by ordinary citizens. The state (and many private companies) can watch us while we have to pretend we don’ t notice, but for ordinary people to take picture or make video in public places, and in particular making images of state buildings or employees like the police (you know, the people who supposedly work for us), is being gradually and by stealth turned into a criminal act. In the past, I have been very careful not to shout about all acts of state surveillance being totalitarian (because very few of them actually are), but there is no other word for these trends. The police are attempting to make themselves the arbiters of how we see society and public places; they are telling us what can and cannot be legitimately the subject of interest and of visual representation.

They are also spending more time now ‘securing secturity’ – protecting the architecture of surveillance that has been built. You can see the private sector recognising this. At equipment fairs I have been to over the last few years, one of the big developments in camera technology has been methods of armouring and protecting the cameras themselves. There seems to be an effort, deliberate or unconscious, to forget the supposed original purpose of such surveillance in protecting us, and instead to concentrate on protecting the surveillance equipment.

This is particularly problematic for researchers like me. We’ll see what happens when I am back in London in May and June when I will be taking a lot of pictures of CCTV as part of my project, which is of course, ironically, sponsored by an official British state research council…

How many cameras are there in Britain? (4)

Despite the fact that it really doesn’t ‘work’, the growth of CCTV is almost out of control in Britain, and it is probably only the recession that is holding this growth back at all…

Here is another episode in the ongoing saga that was sparked off by my discussion with David Aaronovitch about supposedly misleading figures used in our Report on the Surveillance Society, leading to his rather weak comment piece in The Times, my pre-emptive response here, and Paul Lewis’ similar piece in The Guardian.

Aaronovitch’s own newspaper, The Times, has now published a story by one of its reporters, Kaya Burgess, in which she counted the cameras on her commute into work, and found there were a total of 281 cameras on her 3.1 mile route, or one camera every 18 metres on average. 108 of these were state-placed and the rest were installed by private operators (shops,homes etc.). As the article points out, and this is something I have been arguing for years, the growth of private cameras is remarkable and of course, almost completely unregulated.

The figure of 281 is remarkably similar to Clive Norris’ little fictional tale of ‘Thomas Kearns’ of 1999 which sparked the ‘we are watched by 300 cameras a day’ stories in the press, and which was the subject of Aaronovitch’s piece. Perhaps we should feel smug, but that still isn’t the point. There never was an ‘accurate’ figure to be correct about. It was a possibility. Now it seems that the possibility has been bypassed by some distance, at least for London. Because remember, Kaya’s journey was merely the journey into work. It was not even a small portion of the day. It did not count cameras at work, or those she might encounter during her working day, nor those her image might be captured by if she went out for a post-work meal and drinks… her 281 might well end up being double that by the end of the day, and she was not doing any of the more ‘unrealistic’ things that Norris’ ‘busy Londoner’ was.

Of course, this density of cameras is by no means uniform across London or across the country, nor is there one central ‘Big Brother’ behind the cameras, no one guard in the tower. We live not in the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham, made notorious by Michel Foucault’s analysis, but in what contemporary French theorist, Bruno Latour, called, an ‘oligopticon’. In some places we are watched (and even known) intensely and in others hardly at all, and we move through these different zones of varying intensities of surveillance in our days and our lives.

Does that make the huge number and high density of cameras in some places ethically more acceptable? Hardly. Despite the fact that it really doesn’t ‘work’, the growth of CCTV is almost out of control in Britain, and it is probably only the recession that is holding this growth back at all. The Times report also notes that the Local Authority cameras appeared to be placed in clear violation of the existing voluntary CCTV Code of Practice which states that CCTV should be installed in areas of high crime, not just at regular intervals everywhere. Senior police officers I have talked to agree with this. They don’t see the need for cameras on every corner; they want to target crime hot spots effectively and efficiently. And of course, the private cameras aren’t really regulated much, and those on private homes not at all. The important thing, is to have stronger, clearer regulation of CCTV as the House of Lords Constitution Committee recently demanded. This new regulation should control and perhaps even reverse the growth in the number of cameras by specifying much more clearly the circumstances and contexts under which CCTV is appropriate and how it is to be discussed and approved, so that it becomes a possibility to be debated not the normality to be expected.

(thanks to Charles Raab for bringing this piece to my attention and for being fair about The Times!)

UK police spying on activists… again

The Met are unlikely to care. They are not generally known for their respect for the political rights of British citizens…

The Guardian has posted another worrying story (and an interesting video) on the routine police surveillance of environmental activists, most of whom have no connection to any criminal behaviour. The Metropolitan police, who have always been in the forefront of efforts to try to portray political activists as actual or potential criminals, is collecting storing and sharing information, including many private personal details, on activists using Crimint, the national criminal intelligence system. The data includes activists “seen on a regular basis” as well as less frequent activists, regardless of arrests or convictions, their names, political associations and photographs. This information is being shared between police forces to build up more complete portraits of political activity nationwide.

The human rights group, Liberty, is challenging this data collection and sharing on the grounds that it breaches Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. My view is that it almost certainly does, and that the Met are unlikely to care. They are not generally known for their respect for the political rights of British citizens indeed one of their original purposes was to crack down on political dissent back in the Nineteenth Century and they have always maintained this role. They operate the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (NETCU) which is also involve in spreading disinformation on political activists and their HQ at New Scotland Yard will apparently host the new privately-run ACPO Confidential Intelligence Unit (CIU).

I have had my own personal experience of the Met’s way of dealing with activists and it is certainly not in any way respectful of anyone’s rights. It urgently needs to be brought under some proper control and accountability, and hopefully being found guilty of breaching Article 8 of the ECHR, if it happens, will be a good start.

Austin no longer the coolest city in the USA

The latest city to fall for the current wave of government enthusiasm for surveillance that is sweeping the USA is, unfortunately, the city of Austin… Sorry Austin – unless you people do something about this, you are off my list of cool cities…

Austin, Texas… lone island of sanity and liberalism in a less-than-liberal state. With its laid-back attitude, massive urban bat population, superb music scene and reputation for weirdness, it must for some time have been a candidate for coolest city in the States.

Well no longer. The latest city to fall for the current wave of government enthusiasm for surveillance that is sweeping the USA is, unfortunately, the city of Austin, whose authorities have voted to install a CCTV system. The local newspaper, The Daily Texan, jauntily informs us that the city has voted to sacrifice privacy for security: that does not sound like the attitude of a confident, hip place. Sorry Austin – unless you people do something about this, you are off my list of cool cities!

Seriously, though: Austin is not a city with an especially high crime rate, nor has it seen any massive recent increase in crime – even if CCTV was any good at reducing crime, which we know from the multiple assessments done in the UK and elsewhere that it isn’t. Yet Police Chief Art Acevedo is quoted as praising CCTV in the UK, specifically in London. Perhaps he has been reading too much of the hype and hasn’t read the British government’s own assessments of CCTV (conducted under the auspices of the Home Office)?

So why the sudden urge to install cameras? Could it be because of the lure of federal funding from the Department of Homeland Security? It could be. Austin has acquired $350,000 to install cameras, and what set of city fathers turns down cash (whatever it is for)? That was one of the main lessons of the expansion of CCTV in Britain in the 1990s and of course cities are now paying the long-term price of their enthusiasm as they struggle to find the money to monitor and maintain their camera systems. Chief Acevedo seems to have no worries about this though – this techno-evangelist is already talking about automation and computer recognition systems. He really sounds like a guy who has started to believe the sales pitches at all those law enforcement technology trade fairs…

They want us to trust them…

Maybe what Jacqui Smith needs is a dose of ‘Chinese democracy’ to go with her Chinese-style attitude to security and surveillance…

In the last fortnight there have been interesting developments that have reminded us, as if we needed reminding, that those who want to infringe on the liberty of others need to be absolutely squeaky-clean themselves or risk severe censure, and that those who introduce systems which encourage suspicion and spying should not be surprised if people no longer trust them and start to investigate their activities.

The first of course was the saga of Jacqui Smith’s apartment. The basic facts are that the UK Home Secretary has been claiming £24,000 (around $35,000 US) per year in allowances for an apartment that she does not actually live in. The particular irony (and we love a bit of irony in Britain!) was that she has been reported by a neighbour – in other words she was a victim of the kind of suspicious, back-stabbing, trust-no-one society that she has been encouraging. Of course she should resign if she had any intelligence or integrity, but we already know to the cost of our civil liberties that she does not.

Funnily enough, it is to China we go to another example and one with, it seems, a rather more accountable outcome. This is almost the second time in a row that I have unfavourably compared a western country to China – this is getting rather disturbing particularly as I am no friend of the Chinese state, being a long-term Free Tibet supporter. However, Variety (of all places) is reporting that Yu Bing, who is director of the internet monitoring department of Beijing’s Public Security Bureau, and therefore a major figure in the infamous Golden Shield, and surveillance of journalists, bloggers and net democracy activists (as well as those just trying to access unapproved content), has been arrested for taking bribes from a contractor.

Admittedly it is a lot more than the sums in the Jacqui Smith case (40M Yuan, or about $5.8M US), and corruption is endemic within the Chinese state at all levels, but it does show a rather different attitude to the establishment towards top officials who fail to live up to the standards we expect of them. Maybe what Jacqui Smith needs is a dose of ‘Chinese democracy’ to go with her Chinese-style attitude to security and surveillance?