On July 28, 2007, three men viciously beat a homeless man in Triangle Park, the strip of grass across the street from the Calgary Drop-in and Rehab Centre. As they robbed the shirtless victim, they hit him with a rock. The assault was so brutal that the homeless shelter’s top administrator called it attempted murder.
What the attackers didn’t know was that the Centre’s security cameras recorded the beating. The shelter took the footage to the police, who were able to make one arrest based on the video, and issued a warrant for another man. Saeed Osman Yussuf is charged with robbery, and Frank Roderick Musqua is wanted by police.
This crime is one reason Louise Gallagher, a Drop-in Centre administrator, is a fan of the City of Calgary’s plan to install surveillance cameras downtown in the coming weeks. Once fully implemented, 24 cameras will monitor Stephen Avenue, the river pathways and Fourth Ave. S.E. near the Drop-in Centre, at a cost of $500,000 to set up. “If it’s going to increase the safety of the streets in the area, then it has great benefit,” she says.
Others, however, charge that the cameras are an infringement of privacy and a veiled attempt to target the city’s homeless. What’s more, mass surveillance programs in other cities haven’t helped cut crime.
The United Kingdom’s security camera craze started in the 1990s. After pilot projects in some cities appeared successful, closed-circuit surveillance cameras were installed on public streets, in malls and on London’s city buses. Within 15 years, there were as many as four million cameras across the country. The phenomenon took off in the United States, particularly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, with surveillance cameras installed in New York and Chicago.
Calgary’s plan is currently a pilot project, first approved in March. If the cameras are successful, the city has the option to extend the program. Twelve of council’s 14 aldermen backed the plan, and both the police and some area business owners are in favour of it.
“It’s a resource that’s tremendously valuable to us,” says Kevin Brookwell, spokesperson with the Calgary Police Service. While the city will be responsible for the cameras, the police can view the footage. He says the police often use footage from private cameras to investigate crimes.
“I think it would be a good thing, because it would cut down on the traffic from bums doing drug deals,” says Joel Polzen, bar manager of the Unicorn Pub on Stephen Avenue. He says the cameras could deter rowdy panhandlers from hanging out near the front door of the bar and driving away customers, and the footage could be used to identify people who walk out on their tab.
Ald. Brian Pincott, one of the two aldermen who opposed the move, argues that the plan is just an underhanded way to monitor homeless people and pick them up for minor bylaw infractions. “This pilot project seems to be less about safety and more about public behaviour,” he says, pointing out that the cameras will monitor areas frequented by homeless and other low-income Calgarians. “If you want to deal with crime, you deal with poverty.”
Stephen Jenuth, a Calgary civil liberties lawyer, agrees, saying that the benefit to public safety is too small to outweigh the violation of personal privacy that he says the cameras represent. “Once you give up that freedom, it’s hard to get it back,” he says. “If citizens of Calgary don’t decide to fight this, we’ll see cameras on every street corner.”
Anyone determined to commit crime can simply learn where the cameras are and avoid them, he says, meaning that crime is displaced rather than stamped out.
A 2005 report for the U.K.’s Home Office, the government department responsible for public safety, found that out of 13 areas that were under surveillance, only two showed statistically significant reductions in crime compared with non-camera control areas. Seven areas showed increases in crime. Further, the study surveyed citizens in cities with the cameras and found that the devices didn’t change peoples’ attitudes to a place where they’d been installed.
“Respondents rarely changed their behaviour following the installation of CCTV: across the areas surveyed only from two to seven per cent visited places they had previously avoided,” wrote University of Leceister researchers and report authors Martin Gill and Angela Spriggs. “The presence of CCTV did not discourage people from visiting places. Only one per cent of respondents said they avoided places once CCTV had been installed.”
The Drop-in Centre’s Gallagher understands these arguments, but says the cameras in the vicinity of the Drop-in Centre help police the criminals that prey on the homeless.
“Everything I’ve heard from other cities shows that (cameras) don’t necessarily decrease crime, but they help the police solve crime. Is that targeting the homeless? No. I believe that’s targeting the perpetrators of crime,” she says. “The homeless are not the criminals. The drug dealers are the criminals, the pimps are the criminals.”
