British Invasion

New Yorkers can look forward to a future in film as the ever vigilant Ray Kelly, NYPD Commissioner, announces the installation of 505 surveillance cameras around the city. Further funds will establish computerized license plate readers and vehicle barriers taking their inspiration from our friends across the pond. In the words of the New York Post “The security measures would be similar to London's 'ring of steel,' which gained worldwide recognition after that city's terror attacks of last July, when police cameras provided images of the suspected bombers.”

But of course the images captured by the ‘ring of steel’ showed four bombers who had already immolated themselves in the subway system, proving that such systems are largely ineffective against the (tiny) threat of determined terrorists. As yesterday’s news illustrated, even Israel, whose supposed expertise in matters of security is often vaunted by US pundits, cannot eliminate risks entirely. In the meantime the rest of us will conduct our lives, loves, work and play under the watchful eye of NYPD. Thanks Ray.

The importation of the British model is worth a closer look. While researching his excellent 2004 book, The Naked Crowd (enthusiastically recommended to all our readers), Jeffrey Rosen visited that most surveilled nation on earth (Britain), where, “By one estimate, the average Briton is now photographed by more than 300 separate cameras from 30 separate CCTV [closed-circuit television] networks in a single day” (37). There he finds that the evidence that security cameras have had an impact on crimes rates, let alone terrorism, is highly contested. But of course we cannot know either way because “When crimes goes up, the cameras get the credit for detecting it, and when crime goes down, they get the credit for preventing it.”

Commissioner Kelly would do well to observe Rosen’s stirring conclusion on Britain’s experiment: “When we say we are fighting for an open society, we don’t mean a transparent society—one where neighbors can peer into one another’s windows using the joysticks on their laptops. We mean a society open to the possibility that people can redefine and reinvent themselves every day; a society in which people can travel from place to place without showing their papers and being encumbered by the past…If the twenty-first century proves to be a time when this ideal is abandoned—a time of surveillance cameras and creepy biometric face-scanning in Times Square—then Osama bin Laden will have inflicted an even more terrible blow than we now imagine.”