Big Brother Hits Oxford Street

Local News, By Christian Taylor, 9th January, 2008

Big Brother is watching you even more closely now. Sydney city’s network of surveillance cameras have been upped to 82. They’re also capable of zooming in quite close, even when the light is low.

These cameras have been installed right along Oxford Street in an attempt to improve rates of prosecution for perpetrators of street crime. The footage will be kept for 28 days and because it’s stored digitally it’s also faster and easier to search through. Digital also increases the amount of storage capacity.

The improvements have cost the city $3.5 million – but will it translate into a safer Oxford Street for us?

“We now have most of the city covered,” council’s acting chief executive officer Garry Harding told the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday.

“We cover all of Oxford St and up to Kings Cross and we’ve extended into Glebe. If there’s any criminal activity in a street in the city, there’s a fairly good chance that activity will be recorded.”

When criminal activity is spotted by council security staff monitoring the cameras, they can send the footage straight through to Police who can then be directed to the necessary location.

One would hope that when it comes to tackling homophobia that the Police will be interested in utilising the new technology to apprehend those responsible. As the Sydney Star Observer reported last week, a victim of a brutal homophobic assault and robbery was told by Police that they’d already spent too much time on his case to check CCTV footage or trace threatening phone calls made from his stolen mobile phone.

“He told us they get 15-20 cases of this a night and don’t usually get a result. ‘We don’t have the resources’,” said the victim. There doesn’t seem much point in spending all this money on technology if there aren’t the resources behind it to make maximise its use.

Understandably people are concerned about what this kind of surveillance means for our privacy. The council have put a range of security measures in place to ensure the footage isn’t used inappropriately.

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