In several recent public presentations, members of the Pine Bluff Police Department command staff have touted the installation of new surveillance cameras as a tool to combat local crime. At last week’s public forum on crime, Pine Bluff police chief, Brenda Davis-Jones, stated that thirteen cameras had been put into service so far. The basic idea of surveillance cameras in crime fighting is well-established. Their ubiquity in retail environments is a testament to their perceived efficacy.
In the ideal, the city would install a vast array of the devices and criminals would rethink their intended malefactions. Crime would abate and all would become right. Unfortunately, it’s just not that simple.
The only instances were cameras actually prevent crime are those in which the person being watched is certain their actions are being monitored. This goes back to an editorial point we made as recently as November 17 of this year. Unless people are pretty sure they’re being watched, their behavior will be unaffected. To again quote Michel Foucault, “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.” This brings up an interesting dimension of the administration’s plan for deploying these cameras: They have made a big deal out of the secret location of the devices. Therein lies the principle failure of the scheme. Unless people “know” they’re being watched, they will do as they please.
The only way cameras work in big retail stores is by virtue of being omnipresent. You can’t go anywhere on the sales floor that you are not in constant view of the all-seeing eye. Because the cameras see everything, those on the cusp of thievery might just think better of it.
Returning to the thirteen police department cameras, any would-be criminal knows the likelihood of actually being seen in one of the magic places is statistically pretty low — even in high crime hotspots. As such, the secrecy seems like a good idea, it just isn’t.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
The other dimension of this plan that deserves more thought is the concept of deterrence. Humans make estimations of risk (i.e. how likely is it that I’ll get caught), using what scholars call “bounded rationality.” We are generally rational in that we calculate costs and benefits of a given course of action, but that rationality is “bounded” because we do so with incomplete information. In other words, we make best guesses based on how we imagine things to be. If the projected benefit is high enough, we can rationalize away some of the unknown costs. In the case of surveillance cameras, would-be criminals ask themselves, “what’s the real likelihood that I’m actually being watched or recorded?”
Unfortunately for the good guys, if the potential payoff for criminality is high enough, most crooks can psychologically dismiss even relatively high risks — especially if they have a substantial experience getting away with it. This is in part why the threat of long prison sentences has little effect on curbing crime. The risk/reward calculation a generally law-abiding person makes and the calculation a habitual criminal makes are intrinsically different. The bad guys have learned to think about the risk of crime differently than do most of the rest of us. Drug dealers and low level burglars are especially prone to this kind of lopsided thinking. The burgeoning prison rolls confirm it.
All this said, the secret cameras could still have a meaningful law enforcement value, but that value is more likely to come in the form of a post-facto record once the bad deed has already been done. While that’s certainly a useful purpose, it’s hardly the panacea the administration would have us believe. We’re happy to see the administration engaged. We just hope they’ll do a bit more research before wading off into this kind of expense and effort again.