I guess it's just that Nutter's ideas are also pretty worthless. Cameras don't stop murders. In fact, there was a murder recently directly beneath one such camera, and it was busted. Oops. The stop and frisk stuff reaks of 'Papers, please.' I don't think either side really sees these issues differently really, and I think that the cameras and stop n frisk are two steps toward escalating tension.
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I disagree.
Nutter's ideas aren't worthless; quite the contrary.
Of course, they're heavily weighted with negative implications for civil liberties and I'm opposed for that reason. But his approach is a nearly perfect technocratic response to the problem.
As Jim Straub noted, shooters and victims are mostly known to each other and contained within certain neighborhoods.
Listen to the 7/25/07 edition of WHYY's "Radio Times" (guests: Mel Wells, president of One Day At A Time, a social services groups and Kia Gregory, a staff writer for The Philadelphia Weekly ) to get a sense of how a few neighborhoods are over-represented in the stats:
<http://www.whyy.org/rameta/RT/2007/RT20070725_20.ram>
(Real Audio or Real Alternative required for audio.)
Wells and Gregory start out by talking about the gun crime problem as being city-wide, the equivalent of Iraqi insurgency and other excesses. When gently pressed by host Marty Moss-Coane, they concede that the most serious incidents occur within 10-14 blocks. "We know who they are and we know where they are," Wells states at one point (I'm paraphrasing). "All we have to do is go get them."
In the past, this would have been difficult but the means are now at hand.
As I mentioned in an earlier posting on this topic, the city has been busy making use of data mining tools such as Cognos to find patterns in the databases of criminal justice and Community Behavioral Health (a city division of a statewide mental health and drug abuse control agency).
I've worked with some of the players on these projects as a technical consultant. The data reveals what common sense wisdom has long stated: the same subset of 15-25 year olds in the same areas commit the same crimes over and over again, looping through the system, leaving data trails of their activities and locations.
Nutter is proposing what some call 'smart profiling'.
Dumb profiling is pulling over every Black guy driving a nice car in a search for dealers. Smart profiling is shadowing and intercepting known bad actors.
If the profiling starts smart in this sense and stays smart, there won't be any "escalating tension" because Black men who aren't in the system - who don't have what you might call a high 'pre-crime' rating - won't be harassed.
Indeed, these men will be among the most enthusiastic supporters of an effective profiling campaign.
Regarding cameras...
There are cameras and then there are cameras.
The camera systems Nutter's talking about aren't the unmanned, poorly maintained CCTV rigs of 1970s vintage dotted here and there across the city. No, these are tracking devices, linked to facial recognition software successfully street tested in London. As you say, the cameras won't prevent murders but they will enable PPD to ID shooters and create a means of following them. For example, a shooter caught on an 'intelligent' camera whose facial data is stored might walk into a smart camera equipped store or hang out on a smart camera outfitted corner. The system can alert law enforcement of a positive match at a specific location at a specific time. Enough of these sorts of hits and you have a Google map of the criminal's movement.
Apprehension becomes simpler.
This is really the start of a new era. Current gun crime concerns will be used as the rationale for a host of advanced surveillance techniques coming to Philly.
They will be effective.
The left's response should be nuanced, taking into account people's real fears of crime and the real effectiveness of these new techniques which give governments unprecedented abilities.
Rizzo is dead. Long live the intelligent panopticon.
.d.