Sunday 20 September 2015

Data Privacy vs Crime Prevention

Data Privacy vs Crime Prevention
The big brother concern is something that is constantly in the news. Civil liberty groups have on many occasions highlighted breaches or methods of what they deem as an invasion of privacy. Some of the data privacy concerns are based on the change in terms of conditions, on things like social media websites such as Facebook, and others have been based on what the Police or law enforcement have done. For instance, a recent public event, an outdoor concert, created a furore as the police installed a temporary facial recognition system which was linked to a database for drug dealers across Europe. This did not go down well with the law abiding attendees of the event.

Therefore, the use of the technology is not the problem but the fact that law enforcement need to capture all data to then find the people that they are looking for from that data capture. The problem of the data capture is not always contested like this. Also, what is the difference of sifting through recorded images after the event and applying the same software to see who went? The data privacy invasion is the same but the effectiveness of law enforcement is reduced as the drug dealers would have committed the crime and more importantly could have led to injuries and fatalities that may have been preventable with earlier detection.



We have been on social media (@bikalcctv) and often retweeted after a fatal shooting has occurred. In most cases, these crimes are committed by sufferers of mental illness who get access to legal firearms. The issue could be laid to blame on access to firearms and there not being enough gun control but the counter to this argument is that other forms of weapons can be found and used. This is not proven or researched but some degree of the scale of the killings (James Holmes and the cinema in Aurora, CO., USA) may be an indicator that if semi-automatic weapons were not so easily available then there would not be as many deaths as there were.

From social media accounts it is clear to see who is in favour of the freedom to bear arms and the groups advocating for gun control. Our opinion is based around that reversing the culture of guns in places like the USA is not something that can be reversed. In the UK, following the Dunblane tragedy, more controls were placed on the ownership of guns without any opposition, or very little. This, in our opinion, is nigh on impossible in places like the USA.

Does public safety increase if there is higher levels of gun control? The ability to open a firearms store, the type of gun that would be legally be allowed to be produced and the ongoing assessment of a gun owner could be actions to reduce the access to weapons. This is surely an effort and it would be going up against the gun lobbyists, who on are representing law abiding gun owners. Research on how many guns are owned for self-protection, and, hence, very rarely discharged would be an interesting statistic to analyse. We have seen how gun sales rise when a shooting occurs, and this when the news is national. The regional homicides which are not national reported may still cause a spike in local sales of guns. The USA is now owning 40% of the global supply of weapons, a staggering figure. The correlation between this and the number of gun related deaths is clear.

Crime is not limited to legal and illegal use and holding of guns, there are physical assaults, child abuse and domestic cases. A lot of suspects will have an escalation to more serious crime and their background usually will have some form of social and or economic despair or insecurity. There are then of course the socio and psychopaths that are intent on causing harm due to their mental incapacity.

No comments:

Post a Comment