Paul Birch

That does not follow. It's a matter of degree. You can glance INTO phpbb_someone's house from the road as you pass - but stopping and staring is an invasion of privacy, discourteous at the least. Watching a car go by is one thing - deliberately tracking it quite another.

It fails the hassle test badly, because the presence of a camera makes people drive in a completely different and often unsafe way. Drivers are not psychologically capable of giving their full attention to driving when they are aware of someone or something staring at them.

I don't believe it would reduce crime or save lives on balance, but even if it did, that doesn't mean it would be a public benefit. The social damage and loss of personal liberty and privacy through being forced to live under the watchful eye of big brother would more than outweigh any possible gains. I'd happily put up with ten times the current crime rate before that.

One of the most important liberties in the world is the liberty to choose to break the law, with a reasonable chance of getting away with it; a world in which every breach of the law was instantly detected and every offender inevitably punished would be horrible beyond measure, a slavery beyond the dreams of tyrants.

Roger Gough

I've been advised that the latest wheeze employed by London's likely lads is to false plate their vehicles with a London Bus index plate. Helps 'em to get about in the congestion charge area.

social observer

ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) already exists and is already routinely used for crime prevention work by forces around the country.

Rather than static sites they use marked up vans with a camera and operator watching out the back (the operator gives a certain amount of discretion to what they act upon).

The system will pick up on stolen vehicles, those with reports put on them saying they've been involved in crime, possible disqualified drivers etc. They can also pick up on expired tax disks (the report is automatically on the reg number by DVLA) but that isn't the main purpose.

They don't measure speed and cannot be used for revenue purposes.

There will be a marked car further up the road ready to pull any interesting vehicle that gets flagged up.

They are not networked, they work off a CD ROM with a recent version of the DVLA database on it which is regularly superceded (it could be a couple of weeks old so stolens that day may be missed).

They are getting some nice results, and not always the ones you expect - recently our local unit stopped a car that flagged up nothing more then tax disk expired. They got 2 kilos of class a drugs from a couple of 'couriers'. We get a good number of people wanted on arrest warrants too.

As for using networked cameras to watch where you take your car. Aside from it being a bit intrusive its also never going to be that effective. All the system could tell you at best is that the stolen car drove past XYZ cameras at a particular time. It might narrow down the area to look but won't tell you where its stashed unless it literally parks in front of a camera.

It would build up a picture of someone's habits though (make of that what you will)

__________________
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Roger Gough

Large conurbations are now in the regular habit of switching them off because they can't cope with the number of 'flagged' vehicles they discover.

David Agnew

[quote="social observer"]Yes, that is why I am puzzled by the objections to networking it. The cameras needn't be used as speed cameras. (I have some sympathy with those who think there are too many of those, partly because I got done by one myself).

The thing to do would be to arrange the country INTO phpbb_a series of 'cells' so that you can't drive from one cell to without going past a camera. The police would then know in which cell a vehicle was. You are right in that you wouldn't get a fix as accurate as you would from satellite tracking - The cell would have to be small enough to allow the police to seach it. It would be really quite useful; for example when Amelie Delagrange was murdered last year the police started looking for a Ford van reg P610 XCN. They still haven't found it. AVT would have found it fast (and hopefully the murderer with it).

That would be useful too.