Calm as hindu cows

On the train doors on the subway and commuter trains here in Stockholm you can see a few small signs telling you among other things to mind the gap and that security cameras are watching, "for your safety" it says. Stockholm is by no means the only city that uses surveillance cameras in public space, all you have to do is look at London where a tourist can walk from Eastend to Westend and have several cameras watching every step of the way.

The thing that I think is most worrisome in the debate is the argument for having them in the first place: "for your safety". If cameras are there to catch the bag-snatcher, mugger, thief or anyone partaking in miscellanious street idiocy, then people won't do it for fear of being caught. But how does that add upp to being safe? It might protect against people trashing train cars, but what's important here is crime against people. Putting aside questions like the democratic legitimacy of assuming someone is guilty or Big Brother issues, I'd like to show just how transparent this argument of "safety" is.

It doesn't take a Ph D in criminology to say that people do stupid things whether they think they can be caught or not, and sometimes people are just plain ill. In Stockholm, like every other city, there are some very mentally disturbed or plain desperate people using public transport or walking around in public space. Sometimes there are gangs of young boys that have quite an intimidating presence late at night in the subway. Just like everywhere else, at night and on weekends, people get drunk. Fights break out. People get desperate for attention. It happens everywhere and it makes no difference if a camera is there or not. Sometimes people commit severe crimes with the full intention of being caught. Sometimes people are doped up, strung out or barely hanging on to their sanity. The point is that when these crimes are in progress on the subway and commuter trains and busses, all that security cameras do is watch them with an indifferent eye, recording everything and protecting precisely jack shit. It must be hard for victims of crime on the trains to see that sign, "for your protection", after being mugged or stabbed at by someone who slipped through the social security net (these are documented cases, shown on TV and captured of course by....violá...security cameras).

Maybe the only way to really prevent crime on public transport is to have security guards for every train car on the subway and commuter trains and every bus, but that's obviously out of the question. The real uses for security cameras, whether digitally storing every living soul in a superdatabase or not, will probably never be revealed. I just hope that poeple don't buy in to this illusion of safety.

P.S. It's not my intention to spread fear of violent crime. In my opinion it's a fact of life that can never be legitimized or prevented by signs, threat of imprisonment, punishment by being forced to listen to Rod Stewart or worse.