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Canadian Urbanism Uncovered

5 comments

  1. It’s not just the privacy abuses I’m afraid of, it’s the cameras themselves.

    They make sense on buses. That’s it. When is the last time somebody was shot on a streetcar or a subway?

    If Toronto, North America’s Safest Large City, has 11,000 cameras in its transit system, why would any other city *not* install them?

    This will instantly turn us into a surveillance society, which means that one of the best things about Canada is slipping away before the camera’s very eyes.

  2. High profile defense lawyer Eddie Greenspan wrote about the surveillance cameras in today’s Sun:

    In a year, there will be more than 72 million hours of surveillance footage recorded. Big Brother will need a lot of popcorn to get through this movie.

    And for what? Not safety. Video cameras do not keep you safe, and more video surveillance will do little, if anything, to deter crime.

    Full article here.

  3. But cameras can provide evidence and help police catch serial criminals, even vandals.

    We wish.

    The footage will be highly grainy and will not be helpful all the time, while everyone gets to feel a little less private.

  4. Although I’m no fan of his defense of Conrad Black, I applaud Eddie Greenspan for writing about the misplaced theories of the modern “law and order” crowd in the “law, order and outrage” paper, The Toronto Sun.

    Just as cameras in the club district don’t prevent kids from getting drunk acting like maniacs, cameras on the TTC won’t prevent vandalism, or crime. All cameras do is help the police keep up arrest quotas, which doesn’t matter a shit to the people upon which the crimes are initially perpetrated. Sure, they may like to see the people responsible prosecuted, but wouldn’t they rather have more constables on duty to help ensure the crime doesn’t happen in the first place?

    More cameras: wrong. More constables: right.