Posting will be a little light for the next two days as I take some time off work to watch this superlative songsmith whisper sweet-nothings to the indie snobs of Sheffield.

Beer gardens may also be frequented.

Depending on whether your tastes are as highly-refined as my own (hastily hides old Catatonia albums from view), here’s what you’re missing out on.

Iron & Wine

from www.brightcove.tv posted with vodpod

It won’t be much comfort to the parents of Lylle Tulloch or Jimmy Mizen - the two teenagers whose tragic deaths brought knife crime back in the news - but for the rest of us it’s reassuring that statistics don’t yet substantiate the perception that such crimes are ’spiralling out of control’. From The Guardian:

According to the British Crime Survey, knife-enabled crime (any crime involving a knife) over the past decade has remained stable at around 6-7% of all crime, comprising 30% of all homicides.

In fact, the most recent crime survey by the Metropolitan police showed that knife crime has actually dropped by 15.7% over the past two years, from 12,122 to 10,220 incidents.

Nonetheless, that still amounts to a knife-related incident every 52 minutes -  a figure that cannot be ignored by anyone who wants to see safer streets and an end to the stabbing of innocent kids.

From his public statements so far, it’s clear that Mayor Johson intends to pursue a law & order approach modelled on Rudolph Giuliani*: high-profile crackdowns coated in get-tough rhetoric and designed to reassure a frightened public that his office is at least being seen to do something. But whilst the muted introduction of metal detectors at school gates and mobile metal detectors for police officers might pull a few knives off the streets, there’s no certainty that it’ll produce the dramatic reduction in knife crime that we need, as Enver Solomon of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies explains:

“If someone has been a victim of crime, they might carry a weapon because they feel unsafe. They don’t inherently want to stab someone; it’s just that the knife in the pocket makes them feel secure. The majority of children are carrying pen-knives, not machetes,”

[...]

“If you examine the conditions in these wards, these are areas of high social deprivation, social exclusion and lack of opportunities for young people,” he explained. “The focus should not be on enforcement, but rather on opportunities for kids, through youth support services, peer mentoring schemes and employment opportunities for school-leavers.”

If Boris wants to prove that he’s serious about reducing knife crime in London, he can issue all the metal detectors he wants. But unless he matches this with an equal commitment to those already-established youth support groups, charities, volunteer workers and campaign organisations who are trying with all their might to do good and would do even more if they had the financial backing, his words will come across as little more than the tubthumping of an unimaginative opportunist.

*It’s worth noting, however, that many of the reforms made in New York City’s policing were begun by Giuliani’s predecessor, David Dinkins. It’s just that Rudi’s never been shy of claiming credit for anything, whether he deserved it or not.

Update: Of course, the problem of knife crime is certainly not isolated to London, but I think it’s interesting to keep an eye on how Mayor Johnson (yeah, I’m still not used to writing that yet) performs on this issue - it might well teach us something about how the new ‘hoodie-hugging’ Tories would approach crime if elected nationally.

Update #2: A few of the current campaign groups against violent crime in our inner cities. Their focus is mainly on gun crime, but the two aren’t entirely unrelated:

• Mothers Against Violence
• Dodge The Bullet
• Mothers Against Guns

Where’s Tony? wonders one-time courtesan Robert Harris. At a time when his party is in peril and his legacy’s in danger of being plundered by a PR man, why would he be content to watch from the sidelines as the New Labour project he built and sustained (and which quickly collapsed once he’d resigned) faces a hideous battering that could put Labour out of power for a decade?

This existential crisis for the government, which is so much bigger than Brown’s awkward personality, may be flattering to our former prime minister, and awash with the most exquisite schadenfreude. But in the long run the man whose reputation is really going to suffer by the disintegration of the New Labour project is Blair. For despite the great debits racked up under his leadership - the calamity of the Iraq war, the loss of nerve over the Euro - there was always one great historic credit in the account book: his restoration of Labour as a natural party of government.

I’m not so sure about this. I suspect that when Blair looks at his reign abstractly, he’ll consider his domestic legacy to be the combining of free-market Thatcherism with a re-establishment of public services as a national necessity. In this sense his legacy is probably assured: no matter who wins the election two years from now, it’s not going to be achieved by repudiating Thatcherism or by abandoning the NHS. His potential successors would also find it tough to abolish the minimum wage, Surestart, city academies and foundation hospitals. Whilst these reforms might be eroded by the Tories over the long-term, they couldn’t be erased overnight.

So Blair probably thinks he’s been victorious and his domestic agenda will be vindicated. As for the party he once represented, I imagine he just doesn’t really care.

A cell in Borstal, taken by Flickr user Flipsy (Creative Commons)

Whilst the weekend papers were regurgitating the ‘revelations’ in Cherie Blair’s autobiography (did you know Gordon & Tony don’t really get on? Yeah, I was stunned too!), the former Prime Minister’s wife was plotting to make an even more audacious attack on his successor. Why, you might ask, didn’t this feature prominently on Andrew Marr’s Sunday show or get plastered across the tabloids as a ‘Bollocking For Beleaguered Brown’? Well, probably because she was attacking him on a matter of substance.

Mrs Blair/Booth has a Marmite effect on a lot of people, but whether you love or loath her, she still retains a zeal for safeguarding civil liberties that no Labour Home Secretary can hold a candle to - speaking out against Guantanamo when Tony was too timid and even criticising her husband’s anti-terror initiatives. Plus, as one of the top lawyers in the country, it helps to hear from someone who knows what they’re talking about to balance-out the grasping little shit-for-brains who do the governing.

Sure, her condemnation of Labour’s forthcoming ‘factory farm’ megajails would’ve probably been framed by the press as an attack on Brown by a key consort to King Tony, but I hope the less vacuous among us will take what she says seriously.

With the prison population at about 82,000 and rising - reaching a level of overcrowding that’s forcing some to ignore basic safety rules - the government’s had some serious thinking to do: either its approach to crime is a sham of obsessive-compulsive legislating that tackles none of crime’s route causes or… more and more people are becoming evil.

Naturally, the government decided that more and more people are becoming evil and that this explosion in evildoing must be met by building Titan prisons - great, heaving warehouses of sin and bad hygeine where the inmates are fed wallpaper paste and are only released so they can beat each other with baseball bats for the benefit of Jeremy Kyle. I’ll let Ms Booth QC make the argument against:

‘With reoffending rates as high as they are, prisons, in general, seem to fail to protect the public,’ she said

[...]

‘The distance of the new Titan prisons will make it very difficult for many families to visit,’ Blair said. ‘The sheer numbers to be held within them will also make it more difficult to offer individualised treatment.’

Those prisoners who do not receive adequate treatment, Blair said, would remain ‘unreformed’, often illiterate, addicted to drugs and no longer in contact with their families. As such, they are ‘much more likely to reoffend. They will, in other words, pose a real threat to public safety.’

Now despite evidence to the contrary, Labour’s policy people weren’t born stupid; indeed, they acknowledged long ago that one of the best ways of improving standards in schools was to cut class sizes. Yet somehow they’ve managed to reach the opposite conclusion on prisons: that by increasing prison capacity, they’ll be able to imprison more evil doers and cut the level of reoffending. Welcome to dreamland. Here’s how Frances Cook, director of Penal Reform group The Howard League, responded to Cherie’s criticisms:

The Titans are causing widespread concern across the criminal justice sector, given all the evidence suggests that small, local jails with good staff-prisoner relationships are more effective at cutting reoffending.

It’s not rocket science. If you have a small prison with a high staff-to-inmate ratio, if you fill that prison with educators, psychologists, drug therapists and skills councillors to tackle the problems they entered prison with, if you make their time inside so constuctive that they’re better-equipped to become law-abiding citizens, then there’s a good chance that less of them will reoffend. Don’t just take my word for it either; why not try listening to the experiences of ex-prisoners themselves - people who have a fairly decent idea of what it’s like inside and of what might be needed to make these places more conducive to rehabillitation. Oh, and whilst we’re at it, give them the fucking right to vote.

Okay, the government’s too timid to attempt progressive reform because it’s utterly petrified of being seen as ’soft’ by the right-wing press. But the problem with that excuse is that Britons’ fear of crime keeps rising every year, even though crime keeps falling and nary a month goes by without the government introducing some new ‘crackdown’ or ‘get tough’ approach. So if you can’t assuage people’s fears by whipping yourself into a legislative frenzy, perhaps its time we tried a different, more sensible approach and exhibit a bit of what Mrs Blair calls ‘joined-up thinking.’

The irony of all this is that many of these problems were compounded during the Premiership of Cherie’s husband. Even so, there are so few high-profile advocates for penal reform that it’d be madness to exlude one of the most well-credentialled lawyers in the land. At least one of the Blairs is doing something positive since leaving Downing Street.

Related posts:

• Getting Out Of Jail
• HM Prison & Holiday Inn
• Prison & Its Discontents

…That the time for writing those ‘Boris Is An Evil Bigot‘ rants was before he was elected Mayor by the good people of London. Going on about it now just seems like a rather epic bout of sour grapes. Iain Dale would have a field day.

They’ve only just gotten started, but already this mischievous blogger has discovered that John McCain is older than:

Spam, Bugs Bunny, the state of Alaska, McDonalds, the Polio vaccine, Mount Rushmore, Superman, FM radio and both of Barack Obama’s parents.

As appalling as this fact might be, I suspect the election will end up being defined by McCain’s age and Obama’s race. What an inspiring demonstration of the power of democracy!

*sighs*

Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Having had time to reflect upon suffocating, stamping-on and then stabbing his own daughter, Abdel-Qader Ali is now filled with regret. Does he regret the rage that led to the stabbing, the suffocating and the stamping? Does he regret that he’ll never see her again, or that he’ll never know what kind of woman this bright young 17-year-old would grow into?

No. He regrets that he never committed infanticide when he had the chance:

If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her.

Rand Abdel-Qader was apparently a depraved, Islam-hating slut. We know this because despite being a virgin, a devout Muslim, a student and a volunteer who distributed water to displaced families, she committed the appalling apostasy of having a non-sexual friendship with a British soldier. The extent of the sin was more than enough for her father to commence with the stabbing, the stamping and the suffocating, and for brothers to join in.

The mother, of course, was a little less keen on seeing one of her own children stabbed to death over something so innocent as having a crush on a boy. Where is she now? Well, that’s obvious, right?

He said his daughter’s ‘bad genes were passed on from her mother’. Rand’s mother, 41, remains in hiding after divorcing her husband in the immediate aftermath of the killing, living in fear of retribution from his family. She also still bears the scars of the severe beating he inflicted on her, breaking her arm in the process, when she told him she was going. ‘They cannot accept me leaving him. When I first left I went to a cousin’s home, but every day they were delivering notes to my door saying I was a prostitute and deserved the same death as Rand,’ she said.

Yes, in the New Iraq ™, leaving your husband for stabbing, stamping-on and suffocating your only daughter makes you a prostitute. Oh, what benefits we’ve brought to that country!

‘I have only two boys from now on. That girl was a mistake in my life. I know God is blessing me for what I did,’ he said, his voice swelling with pride. ‘My sons are by my side, and they were men enough to help me finish the life of someone who just brought shame to ours.’

I know my mother brought me up to be ‘better’ than this, but if this vile, woman-hating scumbag and all those who participated in what he did and all those who supported what he did were all torn limb from limb by treading on an IED, I’d raise a glass in the knowledge that the world was populated by a few less bastards.

If you rummage through the highbrow geekery of the US blogosphere as much as I do, you might find some chatter about how John McCain is secretly a Klingon. The implications of this are obvious: that both are aggressive, emotionally-stunted, warlike and born with an unhealthy fixation with their ‘honour’. In this blogger’s humble opinion, it’s a comparison that paints a misleading and unfair stereotype of the Klingon people.

Thankfully, Lt Worf - one of the all-time-greatest Klingons and a man who has seen similar adversity in his battle-scarred life - puts an end to such closed-minded bigotry by traveling back in time to endorse Barack Obama:

Surely, I am moved by the story of his humble origins, his absent Kenyan father, his mother working to make ends meet, and growing up without his father in an environment where his racial identity was unclear.  After all, I, Lieutenant Worf, am a Klingon by birth, but raised by Caucasian humans, the Rozhenkos, on the farm world of Gault.  So I know a little bit about absent fathers, and being a dark-skinned man, looked upon as an alien in a white world.

[...]

But there is more that I see in him.  Just as the transcendental challenge of your time is Moslem extremism, so in my future it was the Borg.  The Borg are as alien to us as bin Laden is to you.  And if I, a Klingon by birth raised by Russian farmers, can command the Defiant in Admiral Hayes’ fleet against the Second Borg invasion and fight off the Borg’s would-be temporal sabotage, then I think Obama, with whom I have so much in common, can lead the fight against Islamofascism to a successful conclusion.

When you’ve lost the Klingon vote, you’re in danger of losing the entire Alpha Quadrant. The only way McCain beats this is if he wins the much sought-after Vulcan vote.

Update: Too late. Obama’s even got Spock’s endorsement. Perhaps McCain could try the Romulans?

Now this is would be a successful way of appealing to the country: Vote Labour - We’re As Broke As You!

Lib Deb Voice links to this Tribune article speculating that Labour’s finances are in such a sorry state that it could be on the verge of bankruptcy:

Labour chiefs have until the end of this month to plug a £4 million hole in the party’s finances and avert the possibility of a formal declaration of bankruptcy.

The financial crisis in the wake of the party’s drubbing at the local and London polls comes as Gordon Brown faces another humiliation with a possible defeat by the Tories in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election.

Auditors are due to sign off the party’s accounts soon after the end of May, but there are fears that they will refuse to do so and instead declare the party insolvent.

[...]

One Labour head office worker who has seen the books said: “Whether we sort out the immediate problem or not, we are still going to have to rely on millions of donations. The money is just not coming in.”

A note of caution: the article’s not particularly well-sourced and seems fleshed-out with conjecture. Also, there have been other warnings about Labour’s funding crises/impending bankruptcy in the past, and still the party’s been able to function with some degree of competence. But regardless of the caveats, I can’t image their finances are in any kind of state to fight the next election.

When the party’s lost so much resonance with the public that they aren’t even inclined to vote for you, let alone join your party or donate a penny of their hard-earned money, you’ve got to find funds from somewhere. That either means taking out expensive and ill-advised loans or being funded by wealthy donors who want something in exchange: a knighthood or peerage, or perhaps a package of ‘pro-business reforms’ that end up screwing the very people they went into politics to help.

Seriously, if the party doesn’t find the right message and the right methods to rebuild from the grassroots upwards, the Tories could have a very comfortable decade in power.

It’s pretty hard to keep up with the clergy; one day we’re doomed to eternal damnation, the next they’re singing kum ba ya.

Here’s what Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor told his flock about us unwashed heathens atheists:

The Archbishop of Westminster has urged Christians to treat atheists and agnostics with “deep esteem”. Believers may be partly responsible for the decline in faith by losing sense of the mystery and treating God as a “fact in the world”, he said in a lecture.  Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor called for more understanding and appreciation between believers and non-believers.

Well it’s nice to know he doesn’t think we’re all baby-burning satanists bent on turning Cathedrals into casinos. Bravo, Cormac, for that very Christian act of understanding…

…Except, when writing about ‘atheistic secularism’ just 6 weeks ago, he was singing a rather different, less concilliatory tune:

It is not its attacks on religion that gives me pause for thought, but its vision of what is human. It says that this is all we are, this is it! We have no significant purpose; we’re merely chance products of material processes.

I believe we do have a purpose; that we are made for greater things. Atheistic secularism ultimately diminishes us; it kills the human spirit under the pretence of liberating it. Our democracy is too precious and costly a gift to be narrated by this version of the secular alone. I want to keep alive the church’s vision of humanity which is part of the truth it carries. It belongs not just to Catholics or to Christians but to us all. (emphasis mine)

Now, it’s still early in the morning and I’m low on caffeine, so just run this by me again: ‘Atheistic secularism kills the human spirit’, but Christians should still treat atheists with ‘great esteem’?

Well, it’s a novel way of loving thy neighbour.

From an email I received this afternoon:

Lesson of the past week: for every Boris, there’s a Barack.

How true. At the time of writing, Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States. 143 years since the abolition of slavery and 43 since the death of Jim Crow, the offspring of an interracial marriage is running for President on a message of hope, unity and the enduring dream of America. Against a Senator with greater name recognition, larger institutional support, a once-bottomless campaign war chest and the vocal support of a popular former President, he has won the most votes, the most states and the most delegates, and done all this whilst weathering scandals both real and artificial, as well as endless attacks from a tenacious rival. Even a cynic would admit that’s an impressive feat.

Let me get the necessary caveats out of the way: Obama is neither a perfect person, a perfect candidate or the politician I’d wish him to be. He will disappoint someone every day for the rest of this campaign and - if elected - during the course of his Presidency. As others have noted, he is not the Messiah; merely an extraordinarily gifted vote-grabber with some good ideas.

But it’s not Obama the man I want to focus on here, nor his rhetoric or policies. Instead, I want to focus on Obama the movement. At a time when British liberals/progressives/social democrats (delete as appropriate) are staring at the very real possibility of a Conservative victory in 2010, it’s worth taking a look at the factors that’ve helped propel a Junior Senator from Illinois - who hasn’t even completed a full term in the Senate - into the position of having a genuine chance of becoming President.

First, to dismiss it as a quasi-religious personality cult launched on the back of a few fancy speeches is to give Obama credit he doesn’t quite deserve. Rhetorically, his campaign hasn’t been much different from those hope-mongering underdogs who’ve gone before - the Gary Harts, Bill Bradleys and Howard Deans who all fought populist campaigns against well-supported ‘machine’ candidates. They, like Obama, could all rally supporters around inspiring messages, but none of them had the benefit of an influential and increasingly well-organised progressive netroots.

Since I’ve written about this before, so I’ll just recap the key points. When poltical blogging was only in its infancy and the Democratic Party seemed to be on its knees, bloggers Jerome Armstrong (MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas (DailyKos) wrote a book identifying the key failings within the party:

1. Party leaders in Washington had lost touch with the mood of the country and lost the ability to speak effectively to it.
2. Democrats were too willing to accommodate to corporate interests at the expense of ordinary Americans.
3. They swallowed Republican talking points as if they were the truth and failed to challenge the conservative bias of a well-known media baron.
4. They operated under the assumption that they could only win by blurring distinctions between the parties and by running campaigns for stage-managed, say-nothing centrists.
5. Organisation in some parts of the country was a sham. Active party membership was low, voter turnout was poor, get-out-the-vote operations were often nonexistent.
6. The party had an over-reliance on swing seats as a means of winning power without bothering to be competitive across the country.

As I said in my earlier post:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that the only major difference between the Democratic Party of 2004 and the Labour Party of 2008 is that Labour remains in power - for now.

They concluded that the problems were so substantial and the Dem power-brokers so cloth-eared to criticism that change could only be achieved by applying pressure from the outside - a politics powered by the people. So they blogged and argued and harrassed. They campaigned for candidates who spoke plainly, passionately and unapologetically in defence of progressive values. They lobbied their Senators and Congresspeople to vote for or against bills they felt strongly about. With time and effort, their numbers grew, and with that their fundraising power, their effectiveness and their influence over the national party. There is now no hope of ignoring them and no chance of them going away.

The early success of Howard Dean’s 04 campaign was a reflection of this developing movement, but he was too ahead of his time for it to deliver him to victory. Just four years later, the Obama campaign is a realisation of what was possible. His rhetoric may have drawn people to him, but it was his campaign’s remarkable organisation - thanks in large part to his own website and those of other activists - that kept them involved, kept them motivated, helped them organise and refine arguments before canvassing. To date, over 1.5 million Americans have made donations, the vast majority of them small-dollar contributions, and each penny has helped him overcome a candidate with a superior network of big-time fundraisers. By most objective measures, he has won the first campaign of the 21st century.

With a precipitous drop in its share of the vote, falling membership levels, a cabinet crammed with stuffed-shirts who mumble mealy-mouthed statements that don’t connect with the public, it’s a little late in the day to assume the Labour Party hierarchy can enact the far-reaching reforms needed to resonate with the public once more. This doesn’t mean abandoning the party - far from it. It means finding ways of influencing the party from the outside, ensuring that real people are fighting in elections rather than some Millbank-endorsed, Oxbridge-educated apparatchik who once advised James Purnell. It means articulating our values strongly enough that our politicians are forced to reflect them. It means growing a movement of such a size that it’s able to organise, fundraise and campaign so effectively that its voice begins to be noticed inside the party’s corridors of power.

Yeah, we’re nowhere near the stage of being able to achieve any of this, but I’m a firm believer that we can borrow what’s worked so effectively in the U.S. and adjust it in a way that works for the liberal left. I, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing more Baracks than Borises.

Photo by Flickr user Calijbrown (Creative Commons)

A frank and fair assessment of a campaign that’s driven a wedge within the feminist movement and disappointed even some of Senator Clinton’s admirers with how eager she’s been to sow division for the sake of victory. The whole thing’s worth a read, but it’s worth remembering some of the vicious misogyny she experienced a the start of the campaign which won her a considerable amount of good will.

In the course of Hillary Clinton’s historic run for the White House–in which she became the first woman ever to prevail in a state-level presidential primary contest–she has been likened to Lorena Bobbitt (by Tucker Carlson); a “hellish housewife” (Leon Wieseltier); and described as “witchy,” a “she-devil,” “anti-male” and “a stripteaser” (Chris Matthews). Her loud and hearty laugh has been labeled “the cackle,” her voice compared to “fingernails on a blackboard” and her posture said to look “like everyone’s first wife standing outside a probate court.” As one Fox News commentator put it, “When Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear, Take out the garbage.” Rush Limbaugh, who has no qualms about subjecting audiences to the spectacle of his own bloated physique, asked his listeners, “Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?” Perhaps most damaging of all to her electoral prospects, very early on Clinton was deemed “unlikable.” Although other factors also account for that dislike, much of the venom she elicits (”Iron my shirt,” “How do we beat the bitch?”) is clearly gender-specific.

She’s done a fair amount of the mud-slinging in this primary, but when you’ve had so much mud thrown at you in your life, it’s understandable if attack and counter-attack are pretty default defence mechanisms.

Reaching out to the kids, Mike Gravel-style:

Is it too late to him get back into the Democratic Primaries? I forgot what a funny crank this guy is.

(Hat Tip)

Whilst there’s still not an awful lot of evidence to prove that a foetus can exist outside the womb after 20 weeks, Nadine Dorries and her merry band of restrictionists are happy to take a few astonishing cases and construct a law around them. Dorries is proposing an amendment to the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Bill (yeah, I thought that’d finally disappeared, too) which would slash the legal time limit on abortions from 24 to 20 weeks.

Now, I can’t make an argument about abortion law without sounding like an utter dilettante. I can, however, provide links to people who do know what they’re talking about - like Unity, Laurie Penny and the cast of The F-Word - and I can link to this new-fangled Coalition for Choice website, which gives more information and instructions on how to take action.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Big Brother Britain. On the one hand, roadside speed cameras and the surveillance of motorways, airports, transport interchanges and other public buildings is a public safety necessity. I can also see no good reason why CCTV shouldn’t be installed in areas of high crime, and I’ve never felt particularly spied-upon whilst walking the streets of London - not because I have nothing to hide, but because I don’t feel I have anything to fear. Lastly, if your opposition is based on the infringement of freedoms CCTV represents, your first step must surely be to campaign against the roughly 3,000 new offences Labour’s put on the statute book since 1997.

On the other hand, I’m not in favour of wasting money on ineffective policing methods, and you’ve got to admit the revelation that only 3% of all crimes are solved by CCTV cameras doesn’t reflect well on their effectiveness. I can’t help but wonder, though, whether that statistic remains quite so alarming when it’s properly interrogated. Okay, so only 1 crime in 30 is solved by CCTV, but many crimes are committed in the home or in the workplace, on the road or at night when CCTV is inevitably less effective. Many crimes take place near CCTV systems that aren’t operated by local authorities and therefore no-one’s obligated to maintain them. Lastly, many crimes are prosecuted where the evidence is so substantial that CCTV footage, if it even existed, wasn’t required in court.

So I think Chief Inspector Neville’s statistic was arrived-at by asking the wrong question. The question shouldn’t be “how many crimes were prosecuted with the help of CCTV?”, but “how many unresolved crimes occurred in areas where CCTV was operational?” When you ask that question, the failure rate probably decreases dramatically.

The bottom line for me is this: is investment in CCTV the most cost-effective way of fighting crime? If, as the Independent suggests, it costs hundreds of thousands of pounds to keep these systems operational, is that money being spent wisely or do you get more value from diverting it towards traditional policiing like late night foot patrols? If it turns out that CCTV is the most cost-effective way of cutting/prosecuting crime, then I can probably cope with having my picture taken coming out of Bungalows & Bears for a cigarette.

Well, providing they don’t tell my mother, at least…

Photo by Flickr user jordi.martorell (Creative Commons)