Since the invention of videotape, law enforcement across the developed world has fallen prey to the same folly: If you install enough security cameras, criminals won’t do bad things because they’ll know the cops are watching. The trouble with that view is that it ain’t so, as anybody who’s spent time in a British rail station late at night will attest—security cams are everywhere and so are aggressive hoodlums. The presence of cameras doesn’t deter them. Criminals don’t mind being seen doing bad things if they believe, as they often do correctly, that it’ll take the cops forever to track them down, if they ever do at all.
We were therefore saddened to learn that Chicago has invested some undisclosed but no doubt enormous sum on thousands of high-tech surveillance cameras, to be installed all over the city. We find the idea of donut-eating cops peering at us from behind a desk somewhere creepy. But we’d tolerate the idea if it actually cut crime. It won’t. Surveillance is a tool, and often not an effective one, for catching a bad guy after he’s committed a crime. It does virtually nothing to stop him from committing it—and stopping it is what the Chicago Police Department can’t seem to do right now.
“The idea,” says Eddie Johnson, Chicago’s police superintendent, “is to put technology in the hands of the officer. Sometimes we arrive in time to see the guy still shooting.”
Well, if you’re the guy getting shot, it’s not much comfort to know the cops saw it. The Scrapbook tries to avoid nostalgia, but sometimes we can’t help longing for the old days—when cops patrolled their beats on foot, hoodlums feared the men in blue, and you could walk the streets without feeling spied on.
