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The Surveillance State Is Coming to a British Pub Near You

Street-level Closed Circuit TV cameras (CCTVs) are on the slide in Britain, but you're still being watched.
Max Daly
London, GB

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The CCTV cameras are slowly being switched off in Britain's austerity hit streets and town centers as, one by one, skint local councils and police forces decide they are not worth the overheads.

Before the money ran out, CCTV was the darling of crime prevention. In the 1990s, the Home Office spent three quarters of its entire crime prevention budget on CCTV cameras. Fuelled by the grainy images of Jamie Bulger being led from Bootle shopping center by his young killers, the government spent £500 million [$760 million] between 1996 and 2006 on making the British population the most watched on earth. At around 4 million cameras, Britain has more CCTV than the rest of Europe put together.

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Banksy built his career on the haunting, iconic image of the Closed Circuit TV camera. He summed up the uneasiness some felt under the glare of street surveillance when he drew a boy in a red jacket daubing "One Nation Under CCTV" in huge white capitals next to a CCTV camera on a wall off Oxford Street in 2008. It was soon white-washed by Westminster Council.

But now local authorities across the UK, in Wales, Yorkshire, Cornwall, Birmingham, Thames Valley, Blackpool, and London, are either scaling down the use of their cameras or switching them off altogether. A Freedom of Information request by Labour MP Gloria de Piero in 2013 revealed one in five councils had cut their CCTV capacity in the previous three years.

CCTV is far from being the magic bullet everyone thought it would be. Studies show that, while it's excellent at catching drunken fighting and old ladies dumping cats in bins, it's not all that in terms of crime prevention and detection.

One study said cameras were less effective in reducing crime than street lamps. Another report found that cameras made people more fearful of crime than when they weren't there. When they switched CCTV cameras off in Monmouth in south Wales, crime levels remained the same.

Nevertheless, the scaling down of CCTV has caused horror across Britain over the past few years. For local rags and town hall politicians, railing against CCTV cutbacks is a safer way of drumming up community outrage in the face of austerity than protesting against the decimation of vital youth or disabled services.

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Anna Minton, the author of Ground Control, a damning look at the dehumanizing nature of modern urban design, told me that the demise of the old school town center CCTV systems can only be a good thing. She said CCTV cameras breed fear.

"There is a growing acceptance, even among police, that CCTV is not an effective policing tool. CCTV doesn't make people feel better. It creates a paranoid, sterile atmosphere. Although CCTV is very popular with local residents, it does not necessarily lead to feelings of increased safety, and can cause anxiety."

She said that in Scandinavia and some countries in southern Europe there is little or no CCTV. In Denmark, which has the same levels of crime as the UK, the number of CCTV cameras is tiny, but fear of crime is far lower than in Britain.

David Cameron has given local councils and the police the quiet nod as more and more cameras are decommissioned because he knows that unlike many previous elections, this year's vote will not centre on crime. Criminologist Dr Dean Wilson, a surveillance expert at Plymouth University, told me: "The Tories will focus on immigration and the economy. They will avoid discussing crime and safety because they can't afford to."

But surveillance is not going away, it's merely mutating, and being replaced by a more pernicious breed of monitoring.

A report by the police and crime commissioner for Dyfed-Powys in Wales from the end of last year concluded that the region's public CCTV network was not fit for purpose. It suggested, amongst other things, the ratcheting up of CCTV in pubs and bars—as opposed to streets—by attaching the installation of cameras as a condition of granting alcohol licenses to newly established or renovated venues. Dyfed-Powys is not the first region to crank up the monitoring of Brits in their downtime.

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In 2013, responding to concerns about the rising number of cameras in British pubs, MP Brandon Lewis , who at the time was the government's Community Pubs Minister, which is a strange job, announced the end of "the blanket use of surveillance in pubs."

"This government has called time on Big Brother's secret, intrusive and costly rules that has forced pub landlords to pay to install CCTV where it was not needed," he said. "Well-run community pubs that don't have a public order problem shouldn't be tarred with the same brush. The public deserves to have a pint in peace in a community pub without being snooped on."

That promise appears to have been flushed down the urinal like so much lagery piss.

Are pubs becoming an agent of the surveillance state? Photo by Adrian Pingstone.

When I spoke to Graeme Cushion, a partner at Poppleston Allen, one of the UK's biggest firms of licensing solicitors, he suggested that the government's advice is being roundly ignored.

"Requiring CCTV is the norm in almost all alcohol licensing applications now," he said. "It is becoming more common and more prescriptive, in terms of what venues have to provide and their duties to hand footage over to the police. A decade ago it used to be just clubs where CCTV cameras were a condition of an alcohol license, but now it's low-risk pubs and restaurants."

Cushion told me that one application for a restaurant situated in an old building in a major city center was required to have a whopping 43 cameras installed in return for its drinking license, which is probably more than they have in the Celebrity Big Brother house. The owners had baulked at the overheads of buying and running so many cameras. But Cushion said when venues resist this pressure, the decision ends up at a hearing and the council or police usually get their way.

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When I checked with the Information Commissioners Office (the government department responsible for data protection), they said that your local boozer should be able to maintain its license without spying on you. "Licensing authorities should not automatically require the installation of CCTV at all venues," they told me. "This is because at many premises there will be no record or likelihood of criminal activity and therefore the use of CCTV at these locations will not be justifiable. The disproportionate or blanket use of CCTV to record personal data raises data protection concerns and could lead to enforcement action by the ICO." However, the ICOs warning may fall on deaf ears when up against the recommendations of the police.

In the past, a pub or bar covered with CCTV cameras would be a handy code for helping drinkers suss what kind of place it was, like the signs saying "No trainers allowed" at clubs–when you entered, you were aware there was a fair chance you could get chinned. But while having CCTV in a pub with a weekly stabbing makes sense, there is something game changing about the fact that in a decade every gulp could be recorded.

"Pubs are convivial places and the last thing you want in a pub is a camera pointing at you," said Minton. "Cameras create a sterile and suspicious atmosphere. They are a very subliminal, subtle way of undermining trust between people. But maybe CCTV is so common on Britain's streets now that we are used to it, even when it appears in the places where we relax and have fun. It's not doing us any favors—it's alienating. All the evidence shows that the best surveillance are the eyes of strangers upon each other."

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Photo by Don McCullough

And despite the winding down of traditional CCTV cameras in public places, stumbling out of a pub won't mean stumbling out of the view of surveillance. You will more likely to be filmed by a police surveillance drone than a clunky old CCTV camera.

The Dyfed-Powys police and crime commissioner's report saw drones as the way forward, saying the advantage of using drones would be their rapid and far-reaching deployment, their ability to prove "eyes on the scene," their relatively low cost at between £10,000 to £30,000 [$15,000 to $45,000] a unit, and the fact minimal training is required to use them. The report authors, a private firm of security consultants, added that the downsides to using drones were that they were subject to gaining a license to fly and that "they may raise civil liberties issues."

The use of drones is still a legal grey area but they already being used by several police forces in the UK—including Merseyside, Staffordshire, Sussex, Essex, Wiltshire, Northern Ireland, and the West Midlands to monitor crowds, such as protests, and traffic. Meanwhile, more police forces are equipping their officers with cameras worn on the body, so if you talk to a cop, it'll be filmed. In the not too distant future, this could be paired with facial recognition software, flagging up if someone's face matches a police database.

In short, the police are trying to move to cheaper, more effective forms of surveillance, rather than deciding they no longer want to watch you. The era CCTV as we know it may be coming to an end, but it looks like everyone in the UK will still be the star of their own personal TV show for some time to come.

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