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Friday, 09 October, 2009 
I now receive a report which details intelligence on criminal behaviour through the CCTV systems in the city. These cameras pick up on the activities of known criminals and help the police catch them. These are often deeply unpleasant people, frankly the sort I like to see behind bars. As a politician, there is always an easy answer to a problem. Usually it involves spending some public money, sorting out the symptom of the problem rather than the cause, photo opportunity and happy residents. But the problem remains unsolved. There are times where a quick fix is needed but what if the combination of these quick fixes takes us somewhere we don’t want to be? Gledhow Towers in the Brackenwood estate on the Roundhay/Moortown border was a problem hot spot a few years back. Despite the good efforts of the police there was a serious anti-social behaviour problem. The police could not be there 24 hours a day. Residents felt unsafe and my colleagues and I reacted. We spent a long time scraping together funds and eventually got the residents what they wanted – a CCTV system. Anecdotal evidence suggests a drop in crime, if not a complete solution, We successfully dealt with the problem. Or did we? What could we have done instead? A short term fix: Perhaps we could ask the police to add the known trouble makers to their list of prolific offenders, managed by the Offender Management Team to check up on their whereabouts daily and encourage them to make steps to a more positive life - A great idea but the cost would be astronomical and it takes around a dozen people to monitor 80 serious, prolific offenders in the area surrounding us at the moment. The cost would be astronomical. A medium term fix: We know who most of the trouble makers are, so we could get a ‘Family Intervention Project’ set up to try to see why the family are behaving as they are and to try to correct the behaviour – sounds fair, but some would say it’s the state controlling the family (and what would the state know?). It could probably only be voluntary unless there was a court order, and therefore a conviction of that trouble causer, in which case why are they out of prison anyway? We’re dealing with cause and symptom here but again it’s expensive and may not be effective on it own. A long term fix: This is where we really look at the cause, not the symptom. This could be programmes to get young people into work, and therefore stop them hanging around all day – but where are the jobs? We can pass legislation to make it financially beneficial for families to stay together as money can be a real cause of tension in relationships. We could change the education system to find those at risk, let them off studying history and art to see if we can interest them in setting up on their own as a maybe a window cleaner or a more skilled job such as hairdresser or mechanic. We could change the criminal justice system to discourage criminal behaviour through tougher punishments – Ultimately all this would work nicely, and might even help create additional jobs…and we can see the results in 15 years time…. when the politicians have been voted out and the local people have suffered for 15 years. So we have a problem. Quick and ineffective in the long run, or expensive and no help in the first 15 years. So you can see the appeal of the CCTV system as an instant ‘fix’ but hopefully the weakness of it in the long run. We in Britain have 150% more cameras that Communist China with a tiny fraction of the population – 4.2 million cameras in the UK. One for every 14 people. Yes, you read that right. No nation is more watched than us. A trip through London would see you watched around 300 times. But don’t worry, we have nothing to hide and these cameras make us safer don’t they?….but this is an unpleasant situation. I have nothing to hide, but I value my privacy. If someone monitored my conversations at home the worst thing they’d find is how boring I can be (just ask my wife), so why don’t I let them monitor my conversations? Just in case. After all if we all did this we might catch terrorists (excuse my flippancy). Ultimately this argument of ‘nothing to hide’ gives no defence against further intrusion in our lives. Who is to say the individual monitoring us is so squeaky clean that they have no agenda? They are just people like us. And who is to say we’ll always control the data in this country under our own laws? What if Brussels decides differently, will we be powerless to stop them as we always seem to be? Am I being melodramatic? Well, what if 10 years ago someone said to me that in Britain we’d have 4.2 million CCTV cameras? I know I’d have been horrified. So a decade from now what will it be? Discrete microphones in houses? Vans driving around with listening equipment “to catch terrorists”? You may mock but remember how crazy it would sound to say we would be the most watched nation on earth ten years ago. This is law abiding Britain, not the wild west. In the long run CCTV won’t protect us much. These expensive systems simply deal with the symptom. The cause of the problems: family breakdown; multiple generations who have never worked; unaddressed mental health issues; low aspirations in children; a decreasing number of available jobs, lax checks on who we allow into the country. None of these can be fixed with cameras. When our freedom is gone, it’s gone. We must be careful and this might just involve saying ‘no’ to the demands for some of the quick fixes. And less photo opportunities for politicians of course. All the best Matthew Lobley Roundhay Ward Conservative Councillor Thanks go to a gentleman who works at Leeds University who has kindly invited me in to give me his views on climate change. Sadly he was the only one who thought they could answer the questions I posed in my last column so he gets the fiver, regardless.
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