KEY POINTS:
Celebrity shoppers of Newmarket beware. Indulge in a little shoplifting or smack your little kiddywink while shopping in Auckland's "leading retail precinct" and Big Brother will soon be recording your every move. What next? White lines down the middle of the footpath and recordings of Mayor John Banks shouting "keep left" at regular intervals?
When Newmarket Business Association general manager Cameron Brewer pumped out a press release proudly announcing a network of "state-of-the-art wireless security cameras watching over the streets 24/7", I could only imagine that the posh people's retail precinct must be suffering some sort of crime wave - hordes of common folk from my side of town jealously jostling the Remueraites while they go about their retail therapy.
But it seems not. Newmarket is giving itself CCTV surveillance at ratepayers' expense, mainly because they want, not just to keep up with the Joneses, but to go one better.
"Never before has a wireless CCTV system been done on this scale in a New Zealand town centre," crowed Mr Brewer. "It will be a great tool for public safety but also good for business, giving Newmarket another competitive edge."
When I rang to commiserate with Mr Brewer about how scary this all makes Newmarket sound, he said, "No, no, not at all. The police in the past 12 months have told me one thing we don't have in Newmarket is violent crime. Rarely do we have flare-ups after dark and we don't have any problems with our liquor licensees".
Then, perhaps realising he was supposed to be justifying the expense, he added, "but there are problems ... but no more than anywhere else".
About the best he could do was to laud his new toy's "big deterrence factor" and snarl that "only those with something to hide will have anything to fear".
It must be embarrassing for the newly elected Citizens and Ratepayers-dominated council that their co-religionist, Mr Brewer, has chosen to announce this expensive project just as they are sifting through city council expenditure for ways to slash waste. To me, electronically monitoring crime that isn't happening would be top of my hit list.
But it might be too late. Mr Brewer's association has already signed a contract with Big Brother, Advanced Security Group Ltd, to provide a 14-camera system. Mr Brewer says it's a snip at $70,000 a year. But that's only the tip of the financial iceberg. Although the local police station - open office hours - has provided a spare room to operate from, the business association also has to hire and pay the cost of monitoring staff. Mr Brewer says various budgets have been drawn up, but refuses to reveal more. Or whether the live monitoring will be during office hours only, or round the clock.
Monitoring the CBD surveillance system costs $100,000 per operative, so it's a fair guess that the $70,000 will be the smallest item in any budget. But when you're getting $860,000 a year from the ratepayers to run your pressure group, whose counting?
Personally, I object to being spied upon, but might be willing to support it if there was proof that streets became safer as a result.
But two authoritative reports from the spy camera capital of the world, Britain - 300,000 at one count - suggests no such turnaround. Professor Jason Ditton did a before-and-after study of Glasgow's CCTV system for the Scottish Office. He found no evidence that the system, installed in 1995, either reduced crime in the year after or reduced the fear of crime. The crime rate did fall in 1995, but it had "been falling for a couple of years anyway". Worse, "the number of crimes fell much more everywhere else".
A 2005 research paper for the British Home Office, done by criminology professor Martin Gill, was equally unimpressed. His group monitored 15 spy camera installations, including town centres, carparks, and housing estates. "All systems aimed to reduce crime, yet this study suggests that CCTV has generally failed to achieve this."
He also concluded that CCTV failed "to reduce fear of crime," the stated object of a majority of installations in the study. "The most obvious conclusion to be drawn ... is that CCTV is an ineffective tool if the aim is to reduce overall crime rates and make people feel safer."
Given that Newmarket, according to Mr Brewer, doesn't even have a crime problem to begin with, the only winner here seems to be Advanced Security Group.
