|
 It’s like a page out of George Orwell’s 1984.
The Los Angeles Times’ Bob Drogin recently reported that in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 165 closed-circuit television cameras “will (soon) provide live, round-the-clock scrutiny of nearly every street, park, and other public space used by the 55,000 residents and the town’s many tourists.”
Arguably, Lancastrians will become the most watched citizenry in the country.
At a cost of $3 million, much of the funding for the surveillance system comes, not from the government, but from the all-American private sector, including Armstrong World Industries. (The famed creators of flooring and ceiling products based in Lancaster.) The first high-resolution camera became a reality in 2004, and the number grew to 70 cameras by 2008.
The point of this aggressive exercise in electronic vigilance — which drew scant initial opposition — is to use modern means to make an aging city safer. According to Drogin’s article, Craig Stedman, Lancaster County’s district attorney, described the 3,638 felony crimes that were committed last year in Lancaster as “average,” and local police blame mobile drug gangs for the nonsense.
What they wouldn’t say is that downtown Lancaster has become a haven for a burgeoning class of welfare recipients (and their enablers in the social/legal services industry) who take no pride in property ownership and who have made entire neighborhoods uninhabitable for those who don’t want to be assaulted, raped, burglarized, or solicited by prostitutes. Lancaster, once a charming historic locale, where the Continental Congress had a brief meeting and whose outskirts are ringed with bucolic homesteads and peaceful suburbs, now has a war zone flavor to it. This is not your grandfather’s Amish Country.
Ergo the Lancaster Community Safety Coalition’s quest to install cameras, armed with the hope of trying to dissuade potential perpetrators from ‘doing the crime,’ knowing that they are being monitored. To date, there’s no evidence that the omnipresent cameras are accomplishing their purpose. Why? Crime rose in 2008. No surprise, given those telling results, that the surveillance program now has more than a few outspoken critics.
This past weekend, 150 people gathered in a local park in Lancaster to protest the cameras.
Keith Olbermann, the brash MSNBC pundit, denounced the residents of Lancaster for “spying on one another” in the “world’s worst” portion of his cable news show.
Mike and Barry Winterstein, life-long Lancaster County residents and owners of multiple properties in the targeted areas, are also speaking out. In fact, Mike was one of the original members of the safety coalition.
“Sounded good to me, at first,” admits Mike, “safer streets, private funding, private monitoring. But the more I thought about it, the more ridiculous and intrusive it seemed. I have a camera about 50 feet from my house, and I feel no safer.”
Mike, unlike Stedman, et. al., dares to be honest about the root of the problem: “They sold the camera idea as a way to bolster the city’s image and to persuade businesses and patrons to stay, hoping they would feel safer with the cameras. They don’t really care about our safety; it’s all about economic development.”
It’s also all about law-respecting citizens losing yet more of their privacy and liberties — cameras watching them as they innocently go about their business; cameras catching them in a vulnerable moment they’d prefer to not have recorded; cameras making them leery of unseen eyes.
Mike’s brother, Barry, is especially concerned about what might happen if the private donors discontinue their monetary support of the surveillance program and the city takes over the monitoring of the cameras and uses them as “eyes on the street” to learn if residents are in violation of city ordinances. Lancaster, like many Pennsylvania communities, has no shortage of intrusive ordinances. For example, one can get fined for leaving a recyle bin in the wrong place, letting one’s grass grow too high, or allowing the pet cat to roam unattended on the front lawn.
Surmises Barry, “It’s scary to think what they might use the cameras for, and how much it will cost so they can watch us live our lives.”
As the number of closed-circuit cameras dramatically increases in this much-visited city, it will be interesting to see if the 24-7 surveillance actually ever reduces crime. If it doesn’t, will public officials develop the backbone to take back their streets by kicking out the riffraff? Or will it be the law-abiding who are driven away by the meddlesome and expensive reach of government?
Isabel Lyman holds a doctorate in social science and is the author of The Homeschooling Revolution (2000).
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
