Motus Mentis

20 Comments

1. Bill says

   An entire essay in one photograph. Wow!

   Posted November 8, 2013 at 7:16 pm | Permalink
2. Malcolm says

   Yep. Takin’ the rest of the night off.

   Posted November 8, 2013 at 8:18 pm | Permalink
3. the one eyed man says

   If the world was inhabited by pure and virtuous souls, there would be no need for surveillance cameras. Regrettably, it isn’t. Cameras have shown themselves to be very effective in lowering crime and capturing criminals, as was notably demonstrated in the quick apprehension of the Boston marathon bombers.

   If you want to make the argument that the putative privacy rights of the individual outweigh the public safety benefits of surveillance cameras – in other words, that you will tolerate a certain level of crime as being a fair price to pay for the ability to have one’s acts in public remain unseen – then I am sure that your readership would be interested in the thinking behind that argument. However, posting a picture which is meant to suggest that we have entered the long night of tyranny because individuals can be monitored when they are in the public sphere fails to do that. As a disappointed Brooklyn high school student might complain: there’s no discourse in dis course.

   Posted November 9, 2013 at 3:25 pm | Permalink
4. Dom says

   Are surveillance cameras known to reduce crime, as you claim, or do they just aid in capturing criminals. The marathon bombers did in fact kill people. They were caught, but I think they would have been caught anyway.

   Posted November 9, 2013 at 4:37 pm | Permalink
5. JK says

   Cameras have shown themselves to be very effective in lowering crime and capturing criminals, as was notably demonstrated in the quick apprehension of the Boston marathon bombers.

   FBI Crime Stats from 2004:

   http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/documents/CIUS2004.pdf

   2012:

   http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2012-crime-statistics

   State operated cameras are just a “feel-good” as notably demonstrated in Boston.

   Posted November 9, 2013 at 6:01 pm | Permalink
6. the one eyed man says

   Let’s suppose that there were no surveillance cameras on Boyston Street, and the bombers escaped unnoticed. We know that they had other bombs which were ready to go. What do you suppose the probability is that they would have used them to cause further mayhem?

   Policy issues involve weighing the costs and benefits of various options to find the one which is least bad. You have a choice: surveillance cameras on Boylston Street or a high probability that more innocents would have been killed. Which would you choose?

   Posted November 9, 2013 at 6:27 pm | Permalink
7. JK says

   As you (probably) are aware One-Eye, it wasn’t a State operated camera that did the capturing rather a civilian camera. Too, even though the State virtually shut down the entirety of Greater Boston and then, without warrants conducted house-to-house searches coming up empty at which point the State declared, “It’s safe now, everybody can come out.”

   And everybody did come out.

   A “Regular Joe Citizen” noticed the tarp on his boat was torn. Joe Citizen called the cops (who’d, having searched under circumstances reminiscent of Martial Law then declared “all clear”) and only then did the cops find the younger.

   There’s an inherent problem with what we’ve come to “believe in” with State Surveillance:

   These were the innocent days before the problem became acute. Later, Index runs were collected in Files, and Files in Catalogs — so that, for example, C3F5I4 meant that you wanted an Index to Indexes to Indexes to Indexes which was to be found in a certain File of Files of Files of Files of Files, which in turn was contained in a Catalog of Catalogs of Catalogs. Of course, actual numbers were much greater. This structure grew exponentially. The process of education consisted solely in learning how to tap the Rx for knowledge when needed. The position was well put indeed in a famous speech by Jzbl to the graduates of the Central Saturnian University, when he said that it was a source of great pride to him that although hardly anybody knew anything any longer, everybody now knew how to find out everything.

   [Tnx MP]

   Posted November 9, 2013 at 6:49 pm | Permalink
8. the one eyed man says

   The fact that the camera was operated by a store and not the government is a distinction without a difference.

   I’m disinclined to second-guess how the police acted during the course of an emergency situation. Further bloodshed was averted and the surviving bomber was caught. Whether this could also have been achieved though a different course of action is unknown and unknowable. In any event, whether they acted appropriately or inappropriately is not germane to the question of whether surveillance cameras are good things or bad things.

   The fact that a regular Joe contacted the cops is also irrelevant. The reason the perp was hiding was that his picture was all over the media, thanks to tee surveillance cameras.

   If you think that surveillance cameras are so repugnant that we should risk crime and casualty to eradicate them, then man up and say so. To quote the Grateful Dead: it’s one way or the other.

   Posted November 9, 2013 at 7:29 pm | Permalink
9. JK says

   The fact that the camera was operated by a store and not the government is a distinction without a difference.

   In the interests of public safety then (in the offchance you skip a Prozac) you’ll not mind the government placing a camera in your bedroom? Or, in other words you’d accept some government official saying If you like what your Fourth & Fifth Amendments says, you can keep it?

   http://news.yahoo.com/police-turn-routine-traffic-stops-into-cavity-searches-201433510.html

   Whether this could also have been achieved though a different course of action is unknown and unknowable.

   You’ll then accept the camera in your bedroom, in the interests of “the greater good”? And actually One-Eye, this (in the instance of Boston at least) was “knowable” – now I admit I’m in no position where Russian Intelligence Agencies would be likely to contact me – but if say, I was to be in such a position (just knowing what I, as a regular guy aware – admitting I know a little bit more where the geography is concerned – I think I’d frontburner.

   In any event, whether they acted appropriately or inappropriately is not germane to the question of whether surveillance cameras are good things or bad things. … If you think that surveillance cameras are so repugnant that we should risk crime and casualty to eradicate them, then man up and say so.

   Sure. Comparing the FBI stats through the past two decades – excepting vital infrastructure & even there – the cameras have had little to no effect as you claimed above, specifically:

   Cameras have shown themselves to be very effective in lowering crime and capturing criminals, as was notably demonstrated in the quick apprehension of the Boston marathon bombers.

   Cite me One-Eye, a single example of cameras “lowering crime” anywhere. Criminals, at least in my experience (mind I never dealt with the Ocean’s Eleven sort) anyway – I’ve personally emplaced several camera systems (jails, occupancies, businesses – heck! Approved Access Only places) and the rate of criminally chargeable offenses has gone up.

   Without a commensurate number of either offenders arrested and certainly not convicted offenders.

   That is, “new offenders” – recidivists yes.

   But in “most of the cases I’ve worked” public camera surveillance didn’t accomplish a goddam thing. Admittedly most, I’d guess 80% turned out bad ’cause of screwed data entry when the camera evidence was “good” – the remaining “released video” compromised and in more cases than anybody would possibly think – worse than an eyewitnesses’ recollection.

   Posted November 9, 2013 at 11:13 pm | Permalink
10. Horace Jeffery Hodges says

    Whenever I go out minding my own business of filming people also out minding their own business, the people I’m filming can suddenly become aggressive, even to the extreme of trying to assault me and take my camera!

    In my experience, then, filming people raises the crime rate . . . though I’m not sure why.

    Jeffery Hodges

    * * *

    Posted November 10, 2013 at 1:54 pm | Permalink
11. Malcolm says

    I am sure that your readership would be interested in the thinking behind that argument.

    Oh, I don’t know. I give my readers much more credit than that; I’m sure they were able to work this one out on their own. A tattered American flag with a camera on top? One hardly needs to be Hermes Trimegistus to sort out the symbolism here. (Why, you almost managed it yourself, despite your embedding in the Matrix.)

    But, if I must… It’s quite simple, really.

    If you were to put together a wish-list for a totalitarian state, it would likely include the following items, and would require little else.

    The first three were enumerated by James Madison:

    1) a standing army;
    2) an enslaved press;
    3) a disarmed populace.

    I would add:

    4) control of history and ideology through the educational system, and
    5) universal surveillance.

    The last item was beyond the grasp of even the most assiduous despot until very recently; now it is not difficult, and our minders embrace and employ it with obvious relish.

    Why, then, do I worry, just a little, about living inside a state-run panopticon? Because it is the infrastructure of totalitarianism.

    I’m sure you will hasten to remind me: it can’t happen here!

    Of course, of course — you’ve mentioned that before. You must forgive me, though, for any residual anxiety I might have about it. It’s just in my nature.

    Posted November 10, 2013 at 2:04 pm | Permalink
12. Malcolm says

    As for item #4 above, by the way: the accelerating transition to e-books, and the phasing out of durable printed material, will make managing the past a great deal easier.

    Posted November 10, 2013 at 4:54 pm | Permalink
13. the one eyed man says

    You’re correct: we have a standing army.

    We don’t have an enslaved press, a disarmed populace, or an educational system which controls history or ideology. Quite the opposite: we have a free press, a citizenry which is armed to the hilt, and the best universities in the world. Nor do we have universal surveillance.

    But hey: we have a standing army. I’ll give you that. Maybe you think we shouldn’t. That would be an outlier position, but no more extreme than suggesting that the press is enslaved or the people are disarmed.

    I find it curious that you find surveillance cameras so alarming, yet staunchly defend stop-and-frisk. Nobody is ever stopped from going about their business by surveillance cameras. Plenty of people are stopped while going about their business for no better reason than they are black or Latino, and a cop feels like hassling them. They are then interrogated against their will and subject to a physical search, without a whiff of probable cause.

    If you genuinely believe that the individual has privacy rights, and should be left alone by an over-zealous government, then you should be outraged at stop and frisk. Both surveillance cameras and stop and frisk have efficacy in stopping crime. Fewer people will do bad things if others are watching, and if you stop and frisk enough people, you are sure to find that some of them are carrying guns or drugs. However, there is a world of difference between being passively observed by a camera and being confronted against your will by a cop. The first is benign and the second is invasive and compulsory. The first is applied universally and the second is applied at whim to people of color. Any principled stand against government intrusion and for individual privacy rights would eliminate stop-and-frisk long before surveillance cameras. One is a pea shooter and the other is a cannon.

    As we say in New York: go figure.

    Posted November 10, 2013 at 10:11 pm | Permalink
14. Malcolm says

    The first is benign and the second is invasive and compulsory.

    The first is a powerful, general-purpose infrastructure (such things are only as “benign” as the uses they are put to). The second is a targeted intervention directed at those areas where violent crimes are likeliest to happen, and at the people likeliest to commit them. Regarding the latter, to suggest that the program singles out NAMs simply because the police don’t like colored folks is ridiculous; most of the cops making these stops are themselves black and Hispanic, and whites are actually overstopped in proportion to the rates at which they commit such crimes. (Blacks and Hispanics together commit upwards of 97% of all shootings in New York.) Implemented rightly, stops are based not on the blunt criterion of race, but on the officer’s judgment of a person’s appearance and behavior.

    Yes, police focus these efforts disproportionately on minority neighborhoods — but only because that’s where the violent crime is. If this policy is reversed, it will be these same minorities who suffer the most, as they are also the victims of these crimes, out of all proportion to their percentage of the general population.

    Are there abuses? No doubt. It’s an ugly business all round, and no question. How I wish people would just behave themselves.

    May I assume, charitably, that you disapprove of violent crime? There are choices when it comes to preventing it. One is to let people arm and defend themselves. This is best suited to a naturally well-behaved community (see, for example, Switzerland) — but among people who tend to have high rates of violent crime, it can lead to an awful lot of gunfire, at least until things settle into some sort of uneasy equilibrium. An alternative in such cases is to deny the populace that right (which is easily as questionable, on Constitutional grounds, as stop-and-frisk is alleged to be, but in New York City civilians are, indeed, effectively disarmed), and to grant the monopoly on such power to the police. For this to work, though, the police then have to do something with all that asymmetrical power. This is far from optimal, perhaps — but for the police to have that monopoly and not use it, when the streets are full of armed young men who will kill on a whim, is worse. (Isn’t it?)

    From your tone, it seems you favor eliminating stop-and-frisk. So does our Mayor-elect (or at least that’s what he says). Well, that’s another option: the familiar “anarcho-tyranny” approach, so popular on the Left, which is to control and disarm the law-abiding, and do nothing to prevent the lawless from preying on them. (See, for example, England.) Coming soon, to a minority neighborhood near you!

    I’ll leave for another day your curious assertion that our educational system exerts no control over our society’s understanding of history and ideology. For now, a few words from Moldbug will have to do:

    Except for a few unimportant institutions of non-mainstream religious affiliation, we simply do not see multiple, divergent, competing schools of thought within the American university system. The whole vast archipelago, though evenly speckled with a salting of contrarians, displays no factional structure whatsoever. It seems almost perfectly synchronized.

    There are two explanations for this synchronization. One, Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because they both arrive at the same truth. I am willing to concede this for, say, chemistry. When it comes to, say, African-American studies, I am not quite so sure. Are you? Surely it is arguable that the latter is a legitimate area of inquiry. But surely it is arguable that it is not. So how is it, exactly, that Harvard, Stanford, and everyone else gets the same answer?

    I’m afraid the only logical alternative, however awful and unimaginable, is the conclusion that Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because both are remoras attached, in some unthinkable way, to some great, invisible predator of the deep – perhaps even Cthulhu himself.

    Posted November 10, 2013 at 10:38 pm | Permalink
15. the one eyed man says

    Your argument boils down to this: intrusive questioning and searches of blacks and Latinos are justified because they are more likely to be criminals. Therefore the criterion for judging whether a police practice is worthy is efficacy.

    The Constitution uses a different standard: reasonableness. It doesn’t say that unreasonable searches and seizures are allowed when they work. It says they’re not allowed, no matter how well they work.

    The first flaw in your argument is that you are using the wrong criterion. Efficacy is a necessary but not sufficient condition to allow aggressive police tactics. They must also be reasonable.

    The second flaw is one of scale. You are willing to vastly expand the right of the state to conduct intrusive questioning and searches because some (about 10%) of those who are stopped will justify further investigation, but are unwilling to permit surveillance cameras which are not even slightly intrusive, and whose footage is only used when a crime has occurred and they might be helpful in catching the criminal. Stop-and-frisk has a high degree of intrusiveness and a low probability of success, while surveillance cameras have a low degree of intrusiveness and a high probability of success.

    The weakness of your argument shows up in your evasiveness regarding the Boston marathon example. If you are (apparently) willing to write off the lives which were almost certainly saved by the ubiquity of cameras because they are part of the “infrastructure of tyranny,” then you should be aghast at the tyrannical nature of police stopping, questioning, and searching people who have done nothing to arouse suspicion. If you’re looking for the slippery slope to tyranny, there is simply no comparison between the two.

    * * * * *

    Do I favor the elimination of stop-and-frisk? I do not think that anybody should be stopped and questioned without probable cause. Being young and black is not probable cause. So to the extent that police are stopping, questioning, and frisking people who have done nothing to indicate criminal activity: it should be eliminated. It’s unreasonable search and seizure.

    I noted that not only is de Blasio a resident of Park Slope, but he gave his victory speech there. Apparently he is the only Mayor in the history of New York to have his child attending public school. It looks like the four boroughs which don’t start with an M are rebelling against the 740 Park and 15 CPW crowd which has been running New York. The thunderous mandate he received makes your new Mayor one of this year’s most interesting political figures. One wonders: where have you gone, Bill de Blasio? A lonely nation turns its eyes to you.

    Posted November 11, 2013 at 12:12 am | Permalink
16. Malcolm says

    I do not think that anybody should be stopped and questioned without probable cause. Being young and black is not probable cause.

    This is what is known as an “enthymeme”: a syllogism with an implicit, unstated premise.

    In this case your missing premise is that the people who are selected to be stopped are selected only because they are “young and black”.

    If I were to challenge that premise, how would you defend it?

    Or, to put it another way, you wrote:

    …to the extent that police are stopping, questioning, and frisking people who have done nothing to indicate criminal activity: it should be eliminated.

    With that, I agree. But that is how the program is already supposed to work.

    As for “reasonableness”: what seems eminently reasonable to one observer may seem otherwise to another. (More and more so these days, it seems.)

    It’s those darn premises again. Some folks think it “reasonable” to employ effective measures to keep angry young men from slaughtering people on the streets. That the courts themselves seem divided so far should give you some pause here, I think, as far as “reasonableness” goes.

    Not to worry, though, Peter: I’m sure you’ll get your wish. Unless (until!) the apocalypse engulfs us all, it’ll be Door #3 — anarcho-tyranny — as enumerated above. After all, as you rightly point out, it’s the one with the thunderous mandate. Stop-and-frisk will end, and the murder rates in these wretched neighborhoods will go up.

    Posted November 11, 2013 at 12:26 am | Permalink
17. Malcolm says

    And I haven’t been “evasive” about the Boston Marathon. Why, I haven’t even said anything about it at all! By the time I got back to this thread, my able commenters had already handled the job.

    I mean, really, do I have to do all the work around here?

    Posted November 11, 2013 at 12:52 am | Permalink
18. the one eyed man says

    I’m afraid that hiding behind JK’s skirt won’t get you out of the hole you are in. He starts with a non sequitur about cameras in your bedroom, which nobody has proposed. By that logic, highway speed limits should never be lowered from 70 to 65 because — next thing you know! — they’ll all be 5 MPH. He then scales ever-higher heights of incoherence with the assertion that surveillance cameras don’t reduce crime, which flies in the face of logic. Why would there be so many of them if they did nothing? In any event, the general efficacy of surveillance cameras has nothing to do with their specific application in Boston, where they were indeed successful. This hardly “handles the job,” even if you discount the time it takes to translate Cornpone into English.

    The facts in Boston are clear. Without the surveillance, it is highly probable that the bombers would have escaped unnoticed, free to continue their murderous ways. It is a near certainty that the cameras saved lives. There is a binary choice: accept the cameras, or eliminate them and accept the concomitant risks. File this under #no-brainer.

    * * * *

    Let’s get real. The people who are selected are detained because they are young and black. Aggravating factors include wearing a hoodie, having baggy pants, and walking with a swagger. It is a pure eye-of-the-beholder and subjective decision made by cops, who are wrong 90% of the time.

    A young black man who bought an expensive belt at Barney’s was detained and hassled by the cops (in the sister program of shop-and-frisk, to be followed by de Blasio’s stop-and-fisc, which in any event is far better than the Christopher Street stop-and-fist.) He paid for the belt, but got stopped because he is young and black. A waste of police time and a huge insult to his dignity for no reason at all, but no different than what happens to the multitudes of other young men of color on a daily basis.

    Let’s go back to those halcyon days of youth, when some of us let our freak flag fly. A long haired teenager driving a VW Beetle is far more likely than a crew cut middle aged guy driving an F-150 to be driving with contraband and/or driving under its influence. By your logic, a policeman is perfectly justified in stopping and searching the long-hair – for no other reason than the length of his hair – because he has a much higher likelihood of making an arrest than through a random traffic stop.

    * * * *

    You are correct that “some folks think it ‘reasonable’ to employ effective measures to keep angry young men from slaughtering people on the streets.” This is why surveillance cameras are entirely justified to find these angry young men when they possess pressure cooker bombs and are likely to detonate them. We know that surveillance cameras work, as they did in Boston and with the London subway bombings. Whether stop-and-frisk works is speculative: crime is falling nationwide, including lots of places without stop-and-frisk. It is far from certain that the putative benefits of stopping and frisking outweighs the harm in antagonizing innocent people, even before you get to issues of privacy and constitutionality.

    If stop-and-frisk was so effective, one would expect those who live in “areas where violent crimes are likeliest to happen” to be all for it. Except they aren’t: they hate it, and they elected Bill de Blasio to end it. If you could put on John Rawls’s veil of ignorance — and not know if you would be living in Park Slope or Bushwick — I doubt that you would be as congenial to being stopped, searched, and hassled for doing nothing more than living your life.

    Posted November 11, 2013 at 12:35 pm | Permalink
19. Kudzu Bob says

    He then scales ever-higher heights of incoherence with the assertion that surveillance cameras don’t reduce crime, which flies in the face of logic. Why would there be so many of them if they did nothing?

    Because money.

    Posted November 11, 2013 at 3:28 pm | Permalink
20. Malcolm says

    A ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure is a neutral thing, like all things. When put to benign uses, it can provide various blessings. As I mentioned above, surveillance is the sine qua non of totalitarian states, and the better your surveillance infrastructure, the more total your totalitarianism can be. I already know that you have no fear — despite all the lessons of history, and the unanimous verdict of political philosophy going all the way back to Plato — of democracy in America giving way to tyranny, or ever being anything but benign. So we’re not likely to make any further progress as regards surveillance. I’m certainly not about to bandy counterfactuals about what the Boston bombers might or might not have done after the bombing; at the very least we can agree that they were not prevented from mounting a successful attack. No doubt some crimes are prevented by surveillance cameras. Others are not.

    Regarding profiling: it interests me that your usual position is to defend all manner of government expansions and intrusions in order to achieve desired ends: expansive interpretations of the Commerce and General Welfare clauses, EPA regulations, individual health-care mandates, gun-control laws, and so on.

    What’s different with this issue is that there is discrimination, the avoidance of which is, under prevailing liberal orthodoxy, the Prime Directive.

    Stop-and-frisk is not intrisically biased against any racial group. It is, however, biased in that it targets high-crime neighborhoods, and those people who are likeliest to commit violent crimes. Because the highest rates of violent crime occur in minority neighborhoods, and because young black and Hispanic males commit violent crimes at far higher rates than any other population group, an effective (and reasonable) policy of violent-crime prevention will focus attention on these neighborhoods, and will select young black and Hispanic males at far higher rates than other groups.

    This is not due to a priori racism, but rather is solely the result of the actual distribution of crime. Were it the case that elderly Asian females committed 98% of all gun assaults in the city, any effective policy of violent-crime interdiction would focus on them instead.

    It is, then, the distribution of crime itself that drives the policy, not racism. But because the “progressive” mind reflexively recoils from any interpretation of reality that acknowledges actual group differences, any policy whose effect diverges in any way from mirroring racial percentages in the general population must be taken as evidence of systematic racism.

    Frankly, I’m all for profiling. This suicidal obsession with non-discrimination — this hallucinatory modern fantasy that all people are, in every meaningful way, so alike as to be completely fungible in every imaginable context — is why, in the hope of interdicting Muslim terrorists, we grope 90-year-old Presbyterian grandmas at the airport. It’s ridiculous. It’s insane.

    As for stop-and-frisk: when it goes away, the people who are going to suffer are the people in the very neighborhoods where the programs are enforced. It probably won’t affect me much in Park Slope, and it certainly won’t affect me in Wellfleet (where, for some mysterious reason, there isn’t really any violent crime at all). My interest in having the policy continue is not for my own sake, but for all the good and innocent people in those neighborhoods who will once again have to keep their children indoors, who will be afraid to walk their own streets, and who will now be maimed and killed again, in much greater numbers, when they do dare to venture outside. My own understanding, contrary to what you say, is that there is in fact a great deal of support for stop-and-frisk in these neighborhoods; that the people who live there and are actually at risk there (unlike you!) understand that it makes them a lot safer.

    So: you’re going to get your wish, most likely; stop-and frisk is probably on the way out. I’ll be sorry to see it go. You won’t. Let’s leave it there, OK?

    Posted November 11, 2013 at 7:51 pm | Permalink