EDMONTON JOURNAL
Begone, Big Brother. Your camera, too: Surveillance cameras should be really be trained on politicians, not citizens
Sunday 24 August 2003
p. A14
 
My friend and colleague Paula Simons and I rarely agree on any topic. But on the subject of police surveillance cameras we see eye to eye -- or is that electronic eye to electronic eye?

I bristle at the camera's intrusive mission; so does Paula. Whether or not you have given the police any reason to suspect you of a crime, they are monitoring your activities in hopes of catching you in a criminal act.

This turns the presumption of innocence on its head and, no matter how benign the intent of our own local police, conjures up visions of a police state in which your every action is recorded for possible violations.

By their very nature, the cameras are an infringement of our ancient right to be free from scrutiny unless we have given authorities reason to suspect us and until they have provided a magistrate enough evidence to convince him they are justified in watching us. The infringement begins, without a hearing, the second the lens snaps on and our images flicker onto the monitor's screen.

Such universal monitoring confuses who is the boss, who exists for whom. Do the people exist for the state and its agents, or are we in charge?

There has been a lot written and said lately about the "democracy deficit" in Canada, and rightly so. Unelected judges and unelected officials in the Prime Minister's Office now make dozens of decisions each year, vital to Canadians' lives, without any reference to Parliament.

Canada never had representative government in the way the Americans do, but even the form of democracy we developed for the entire Commonwealth -- responsible government -- has largely vanished as less and less is decided by those we elect and more and more by those who are unaccountable to voters.

In a way, police surveillance cameras are part of the democracy deficit because they forget who is ultimately in charge in our society, or at least who is supposed to be in charge. The police and the government exist for us, not the other way around.

If there is to be surveillance without warrants (and there shouldn't be), it should be of politicians and police by the people, not vice versa.

Many police forces use a variation of "To serve and protect" as their motto. It gets the master-servant relationship the right way 'round. We won't be free long, though, if that axiom is reversed, if it becomes we, the people, who are the ones mandated to serve and protect the state.

When London was debating the creation of the first permanent police force in the Empire in the early 19th century, there was great public resistance. The police will soon begin targeting the innocent to fill in their time, the critics charged. Free people will be subjected to monitoring while merely going about their everyday, law-abiding activities, they warned.

In response, Sir Robert Peel, who as Home Secretary established the Metropolitan Police in 1822 (and after whom London's "bobbies" take their name), set out nine principles of what he called "consent policing" -- policing only by and with the consent of the public.

Principal among these was the contention that "Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police."

Surveillance cameras break that unity. No longer are police part of the community. Instead, the community -- law-abiders and lawbreakers alike -- become a vast, anonymous "them" to the police's and politicians' "us."

The break has been a long time coming. It did not begin with the cameras. Thanks primarily to the politically correct liberal notion that there are no "good guys" and "bad guys," police -- especially police brass -- have come dangerously close over the past three decades to seeing all of the public, and not just the criminal element in it, as potential threats to them and to the public order.

Somehow the public has come to exist outside our systems of government and justice, rather than being the sum total of those systems, with the police, the politicians and the courts merely being our administrative surrogates, as Peel intended when he wrote that the police are "only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence."

Now, too often, police see the public as the threat to the system and to order, and have no compunction against watching and monitoring everyone.

Saturday, Paula wrote quite correctly that the fault is in us as much as the police and politicians -- in our complacency toward the intrusion and our lack of vigilance against our rights being eroded:

"But I don't think our society can accept a social contract that says the state has the right to monitor and record your movements without probable cause to believe you're doing something wrong."

Bravo.

So it was with great delight that I read this week that Edmonton's first police camera, on Whyte Avenue, was useless against a crime committed right under its nose.

The camera is a violation of our freedoms and useless to boot. Shut it off and take it down.

_______________________
Lorne Gunter
Columnist, Edmonton Journal
Editorial Board Member, National Post
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