Big Brother's Not Been Watching Enough: The Hypocrisy Of British Tolerance (Part Three)

Britain is the most extensively watched society in the world, in terms of the number of CCTV surveillance cameras per head of population. Three weeks ago, a senior British policeman criticised the extent of CCTV usage, expressing concern that CCTV was spreading out from the cities into the villages and that Britain was in danger of becoming a Big Brother society.

In my February blog entry, I expressed the view that Big Brother – the Channel Four reality-TV show – was a symbol for British society as a whole, as a meritocracy defined in relation to increasingly amoral market forces. Is it also a symbol for Britain as a CCTV culture: one where recording and viewing of actions and events that have previously been beyond the public view is driven by fear of the hidden forces that threaten to undermine the superficial tolerance of the market society – fear of anti-social behaviour and intentions of every kind, from the random and aggressive vandalism of local yobs to the ruthless and systematic actions of the organised criminal or terrorist?

One might say that CCTV is a prime example of the privatisation of the public domain: not just because the operation of CCTV systems is contracted out to private companies, but because it corresponds to a view of the world that is one of the citizen obsessed by watching what is happening 'out there' in the public space that threatens to overrun the security and control of his / her private realm and create a world of chaos and violence. In this way, CCTV is a way of reclaiming for the private individual a public space that has increasingly come to be seen as alienating and hostile. But at the same time, CCTV confirms and perpetuates that alienation from the public sphere, in that responsibility for making our cities, roads and countryside a secure environment in which the citizen can go about his / her private business is transferred away from individual citizens and 'outsourced' to anonymous 'providers' that are not part of the community they are watching.

Indeed, the extent of CCTV deployment in Britain could be taken as an indicator of the degree to which 'old-fashioned' communities have broken down. In a real community, streets, towns and villages belong to the people who live there, and they in turn have a sense of belonging to their environment and to each other. This is what provides real security: people watch out for each other and care for their environment; and there is not so much of a divide between that external social and physical environment, and the 'private' realm: the one flows into the other. CCTV marks the increasing retreat of individuals into private existences separated from the social and physical environment: into their homes, careers, and ever more atomised nuclear families. The external world beyond these bastions is correspondingly not only perceived as an ever greater threat to assets that are all the more vulnerable the more value is invested in them; but it actually becomes a greater threat. This is because 'the outside' is a space that the individual has absolved him- / herself of responsibility for shaping into a human and caring environment, so effectively handing it over to persons who may not have the individual's or the community's best interests at heart. In this sense, perhaps the encroachment of CCTV into the rural environment demonstrates that communities have increasingly broken down there, too, as well as in the cities.

Despite all of this, surveys show that people generally feel more secure in going about places where CCTV has been installed than where it hasn't. 'Classic' CCTV is more effective at reducing casual crime (such as muggings, car crime and violence against the person) than systematic crime, such as drug or paedophile rings, and terrorism. But even classic CCTV has its limits. Offenders can learn where the blind spots of existing cameras are; and while CCTV has a relative deterrent effect, it cannot really prevent the determined thug or thief from carrying out his / her intentions. In other words, it is no substitute for individuals or, rather, communities taking charge of their own security, and being prepared to keep watch over the places where the camera can't penetrate and to intervene when a criminal act is taking place – and the more people are involved in intervening, the less is the risk of being hurt in doing so. But the absence of such a genuine community-wide response to petty criminality and anti-social behaviour generates the demand for more and more cameras to be deployed to cover those blind spots. And as for the petty criminal or anti-social individual themselves, we simply want them taken out of the public domain, whether through detention in prisons or their equivalent, or through so-called Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), which – like anti-terrorist Control Orders – simply involve confining the offenders away from our embattled private lives into their own private spaces and homes. In either case, the problem of their intolerable behaviour is not resolved but merely displaced, to re-emerge elsewhere and on a subsequent occasion.

In other words, CCTV, as a response to behaviour that is beyond what a tolerant society can tolerate, illustrates the same ambiguities and inadequacies as Channel Four's Big Brother and Control Orders: while it appears to be a means to place radically intolerant / intolerable individuals under watch and control, it is actually a means of suppressing and censoring such intolerance rather than really dealing with it. The urge to watch such anti-social individuals is driven by a wish not to see them in a public domain that belongs to the tolerant, private individual who keeps themself to themself. The racist, terrorist or thug can continue to be a racist, terrorist or thug in a confined, private space away from our own. But this exile of the racist, terrorist or anti-social individual from our private world and consciousness means that ultimately (s)he will be free to operate in the public realm from which we have retreated.