Social housing and the war against anti social behaviour
Filed Under Country Curtain | Posted on January 12, 2008
The social housing sector is a frontline force in the %26lsquo;war against yobs, but given worries about privacy, civil liberties, and the rise of a %26lsquo;surveillance society, is there a danger that the mechanisms to protect us from anti-social behaviour can become themselves anti-social?
Its a paradox that might one day come back to haunt us all: that while we fear the unblinking eye of the CCTV camera, we nevertheless welcome its unflinching vigilance when something untoward happens.
Theres perhaps a degree of hypocrisy too; the camera is double-plus-good when it is pointed at the nefarious, ever-threatening %26lsquo;other but can be an outrage when aimed at %26lsquo;respectable citizens such as ourselves. When if we think about it all, that is. Yet the electronic eyes of the State, or an outsourced security partner, or some other private company, are everywhere and they have become an important component in the arsenal deployed against anti-social behaviour.
The deployment of CCTV can be traced back to the 1960s, but the proliferation from the 1990s onwards was fuelled by todays familiar justifications vigilance against crime and terrorism. Britain has consequently become notorious for its degree of blanket surveillance. Indeed its a world leader for keeping a multitude of beady eyes on its citizenry. So much so, that one wonders whether North Koreans joke about the amount of privacy they enjoy in relation to we Brits.
Today, there are around 4.2 million cameras one for every 14 people in Britain. Over the last ten years half a billion pounds of public money has been spent on expanding and developing the CCTV infrastructure.
Nor have they remained silent witnesses. Nowadays, they can bark orders at us a nice Orwellian touch, they use childrens voices and some can eavesdrop on our conversations. Soon, though still in its infancy, theyll be able to recognise our faces.
Cameras also form the most celebrated or most infamous component of what the information commissioner Richard Thomas called the %26lsquo;surveillance society. This is a world where every citizen is watched and recorded, where their movements are logged, their habits cross referenced, every detail data-mined and stored, while we get on with our daily lives oblivious to this comprehensive cataloguing.
Its a world where the eponymous %26lsquo;they will know more about %26lsquo;us than we do ourselves, and it begs the question in such a world are we citizens or suspects or even inmates?
When he released his report into the matter in September 2006, Thomas said he feared we were sleepwalking into such a surveillance society. He has since added we have in fact woken up in such a state and his office has called for new powers to safeguard against abuses of the technology. In the summer, the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) also launched a consultation to develop new codes of practice for the use of CCTV. For one thing, it demands that they are not used to record peoples conversations.
Thomas is not alone in his concerns. The organisation Liberty has called for tighter legislation to regulate the use of CCTV and also backed the call for ICO to have greater regulatory resources and powers.
%26lsquo;Big Brother references are obvious, and thanks to a certain Channel 4 programme have rather lost their satirical bite, but Thomas himself was quick to disavow notions of a conspiracy by a cabal of powerful and faceless autocrats-in-making (perhaps he was afraid someone was watching).
His report, hoping to stimulate debate and lead to greater awareness of this electronic panopticon, was careful to portray the positives and the negatives of the bewildering diversity of technology and processes involved, the ways they can benefit individuals, as much as curtail perfectly legitimate behaviour let alone the anti-social variety.
In that regard, its actually all the more chilling to contemplate the dystopian possibilities alluded to in the report.For he presents a path not steered by malice aforethought, but by incremental steps, the laws of unintended consequences, of good measure interacting to dubious effect. The road to Hell, as it goes, is paved with good intentions.
The risks that arise from excessive surveillance affect both individuals and society as a whole, Thomas said, calling for his office to have greater safeguarding powers to %26lsquo;to keep an eye on the watchers. As well as risks such as identity mistakes and security breaches, there can be unnecessary intrusion into peoples lives and loss of personal autonomy. There is also concern that too much surveillance will create a climate of fear and suspicion. It is essential that before new surveillance technologies are introduced, full consideration is given to the impact on individuals and safeguards are in place to minimise intrusion.
Social housing landlords are, inevitably, at the sharp end of balancing the conundrum that is CCTV. On the one hand, the cameras form an important tool that is all too often not only welcomed but demanded by those facing the blight real or perceived of anti-social behaviour. It creates a significant motivational force driving the continued deployment of these %26lsquo;all-seeing eyes. For those in the frontline of tackling the issue, there can be little scope for the luxury of considering whether the cure might in time become the disease.
In his report, Thomas presented a range of scenarios that presented the potential positive and negative outcomes in humanised terms. In one, its 2016 and things have clearly gone badly
wrong in social housing at least on the Dobcroft Estate.
Since birth, for those young enough, every resident is a %26lsquo;customer of a %26lsquo;personal behaviour scheme outsourced to a private consortium. For many, this involves %26lsquo;voluntarily having an RFID tag implanted under the skin, which registers automatically with sensors placed in their homes and on the gates of the estate.
The tags are used to monitor compliance with one of the periodic curfews imposed on the estate. In this case, everyone aged 18 or younger is barred from entering or leaving the estate, after an elderly woman living at a nearby retirement home reported %26lsquo;youths causing trouble. The woman had been browsing the open access surveillance system when she spotted the %26lsquo;youths on one of the camera feeds. There is no verification for all the technology invoked of the youths identity, or where they live, or indeed, no hint of where the trouble took place. The estates young people have simply been put in %26lsquo;lockdown.
For Sara, the story finishes, this means that to see her best friend Aleesha outside school hours, one of them has to risk an encounter with the estates community wardens who are armed with tazers and tend to shoot first and ask questions later. Dystopian stuff, indeed, but a pause for thought.
The camera divides us into the observers and the observed and paradoxically blinds us to that division. To be on the wrong side of the camera is to metamorphose into a %26lsquo;wrong %26lsquo;un. Thomas point, is that for all CCTV currently can create peace of mind, and gather evidence to help address anti-social behaviour, it can as he said foster suspicion and mistrust and so breed the very problems it was designed to resolve.
For social housing its the partnerships with police, social services, local authorities, and the tenants and residents themselves that make the anti-social behaviour strategies work. The technology is but a tool. As RSLs the length and breadth of the country have learned in recent years, as they thrash out best practice, trust is the grease that lubricates the wheels of any successful strategy.
All told, it places the social housing sector at the heart of the paradox. Let its sentinel gaze stray too long and hard at those CCTV camera feeds, and it risks losing sight of the way ahead to the cost of us all. On the other hand, the sectors requirements to work closely with tenants provide scope for the antidote: the measure of trust that fertilizes community cohesion.
Its a matter of keeping both eyes open.
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