Nineteen Eighty-Four
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.”
George Orwell, 1984Having driven a cab for about 25 years I can come up with some truisms most of you will agree with – we pick up a wide variety of passengers and looks are very often deceiving. The smartest looking passengers can very often be complete and utter arses – whereas those who can least afford it are those who are more likely to give you tip. Indeed, there are times when in taking general verbal diarrhoea from passengers I secretly wish I could turn up at their place of work on a Monday morning and return the favour.
Passengers expect drivers to keep their confidence – they occasionally want someone to talk to, sharing their frustrations on all manner of subjects – naturally; in being cab drivers, we have a duty and timeless duty no less to orate our wide and varied knowledge of every topic of conversation as well as an opinion. As George Burns once famously quipped – “Too bad the people who really know how to run the country are all too busy either driving taxi cabs or cutting hair.”
This brings me to the subject of this month’s sermon, CCTV.
CCTV images are recorded in other modes of public transport – airports, trains and buses all have CCTV images recorded – it was only a matter of time until CCTV came to taxis. It isn’t a new phenomenon – I can recall video recorders (remember them?) being installed into taxis with VHS tapes having to be changed each day. But let’s get things into perspective here – CCTV is only accepted by society because of a growing fear of crime – as I will return to later – its perceived usefulness will presumably only last as long as we have a society held in fear.
CCTV isn’t the innocent thing we are led to believe – its invention and introduction was, and continues to be for surveillance. We can all probably remember the computer HAL from the film 2001 – a space odyssey with a CCTV camera following every move.
The riots of summer 2011 led to numerous arrests – however the majority of these were in the days after the rioting and because of CCTV footage. No bad thing – however, the damage was already done – the CCTV didn’t actually stop the crimes – neither did it catch the shooting of Mark Duggan – which sort of suggests one rule for one and another rule for authority – innocent until proven Irish, as the old saying goes.
Its usefulness in taxis are undoubtedly numerous, it is a deterrent against crime both by the driver and passenger, it acts as a deterrent against malicious allegations – covering the driver and the passenger. Sadly, in the eyes of many, the driver is very often the person (quite wrongly) having to prove innocence – to this end CCTV can and does greatly assist.
Of course, the issue is – where does it end?
This past month has seen Sheffield Council bring forth policy that will make CCTV a mandatory condition of license for both taxis and private hire vehicles. Chair of the council licensing committee, Councillor John Robson, in the usual manner said the policy was “definitely needed”, backed the decision in the usual fashion, saying the results of a trial in 2007 were “overwhelmingly amazing”:
“One in seven fares prior to the trial resulted in an incident – whether that was verbal abuse, threats of violence, physical assault, a dispute over the fare, people running off without paying or damage to the taxi.”
“Overwhelmingly amazing”, steady on old chap, you’ll run out of superlatives – that aside, you ain’t met me.
These figures, if correct, represent a total indictment upon the taxi users of Sheffield – the 1 in 7 fares ratio is illuminating because that roughly translates to 3 incidents during an average shift of about 20 hires – and 7 incidents on a busy Saturday night – per taxi. If we are to believe the 1 in 7 figures ratio (and bearing in mind there’s 850 odd taxis in Sheffield) – a Saturday night will see South Yorkshire police expect to deal with almost 6000 taxi related complaints.
By any reckoning those figures make Sheffield the worst place in the UK to drive a cab – indeed – I strongly suspect there’s cab drivers in hell thinking, “This jobs crap, what with the abuse from Satans acolytes and the torture – but it could be worse, I could be driving cab in Sheffield”.
If there are nearly 6000 incidents in Sheffield on a Saturday night (and I have no possible reason to believe that figure) – perhaps the council need to think of something a little more radical than CCTV – I would suggest stocks in their City centre – and with figures like those – they’ll need a few of them.
More seriously, the 1 in 7 figure does sound like something that only a cab driver would come up with – a cab driver who perhaps wanted CCTV funding. This aside – I wonder why the police don’t appear to have been contacted regarding crime incidents involving taxis – if there are 6000 incidents every Saturday night – then I’m sure they’d want input.
Sadly, the recent report of Sheffield Council didn’t attach the 2007 CCTV findings to draw any information – although a copy has been requested.
The costs for the equipment work out at a reported £500 per cab – in terms of taxis alone this will come to some £425,000. If we include private hire – then the bill will come to about £1.1 million.
I don’t think there’s any real argument about the potential usefulness of CCTV in taxis – we are a potential source of income for every thief and vagabond out there –mobile cash machines for the criminal underclass. Every single day there is a taxi or minicab driver assaulted.
There is a distinct difference between a camera fitted for the protection of the driver and a camera fitted to snoop on the driver. The report of Sheffield council even highlighted one potential flaw in their scheme; it was stated;
“A system that holds a full 8 hours of a drivers shift, currently is not available and if available would need driver access to change the storage device to retain the images of each and every shift undertaken.”
In effect they appear to be adopting a policy – based on dubious evidence – at a cost of £1.1 million – for a system that won’t apparently cover a drivers full shift.
If we go down the line of access to the system – the person paying for it will not have access – even though in some cases they will have to pay for an ICO license. If they want access to their own equipment – they will have to pay (in some cases) for the images to be downloaded – let’s hope the person downloading the images has a license.
I don’t really believe a local authority committee should be the judge of whether or not CCTV is fitted into a taxi – let alone be the people to decide upon what types of CCTV are acceptable and who should have access. Broadly speaking, this type of legislative stupidity is the equivalent of a local authority telling the driver what kind of stereo to buy and then saying what radio station they can listen to.
There appears to be a presumption – by not allowing a driver access to CCTV images – the authorities will be a safer pair of hands, sadly, this isn’t actually the case. The ICO in December reported that they had fined four local authorities a total of £300K and were critical of their “attitude towards protecting personal data”.
Leeds City Council were fined £95K when they sent sensitive personal details about a child in care to the wrong person, revealing details of a criminal offence, school attendance and information about the child’s relationship with their mother.
Plymouth City Council followed a similar pattern, with information passed to the wrong recipient including highly sensitive personal information about two parents and four children, notably allegations of child neglect relating to ongoing care proceedings. The breach occurred when two reports about separate child neglect cases were sent to the same shared printer. Three pages from the first report were mistakenly collected with the papers from the second case, and so were handed to the wrong family. Plymouth were fined £60K.
Devon County Council were fined £90K when a social worker used a previous case as a template for an adoption panel report they were writing, but a copy of the old report was sent out instead of the new one. The mistake revealed personal data of 22 people, including details of alleged criminal offences and mental and physical health.
In Lewisham, a social worker left sensitive documents in a plastic shopping bag on a train, after taking them home to work on. The files, which were later recovered from the rail company’s lost property office, included GP and police reports and allegations of sexual abuse and neglect. The council were fined £70K.
Indeed, the case of The Information Commissioner -v- Southampton City Council Feb 2013 – broadly points to a local authority doing what it thought was right as opposed to doing what was actually legal. Thousands of pounds of tax payers money could and should have been saved if the authority had bothered to check the legalities with the ICO.
Of course (and as mentioned above), the fear of crime is the main reason CCTV is growing in ever-increasing numbers, this numbers game is quite tricky. One reports 1 CCTV camera for every 32 people. Another report told of London alone having some 10,000 home office funded CCTV cameras costing some £200 million, yet we have 80% of crime going unsolved.
If we ramp up public fear then the public will in turn accept the need for CCTV. The political history with this is openly available and known to all – should a foolish and widely blinkered public wish to check.
The ramped up fear of terrorism brought about increased security measures after the terror attacks in the US on 11 September 2001 – the increased security was so successful the 7/7 attacks happened here in 2005. One report states: “In 1999, London had a CCTV system with 21,000 cameras installed. However, in 2010, the CCTV system has a total of 59,753 cameras.”
Interestingly enough the 7/7 attacks are seemingly cited in the report of Sheffield Council where in 2005 the issue of driver safety was discussed following the attacks. God only knows what Sheffield council thought terrorists may bomb in South Yorkshire – judging from my last visit the place had nothing worth bombing left.
Sarcasm aside, we all know the threat of terror strikes from disgruntled Muslim’s are nowhere near the actual strikes committed by the Provisional IRA. In 1996 CCTV was used to track a lorry carrying explosives from Northern Ireland to the London Docklands – we all know this – we saw the pictures on the BBC – the Docklands were bombed by the lorry and £100 million’s worth of damage was caused – 2 people were killed. We had CCTV footage but as mentioned above – the crime wasn’t actually stopped.
Nationally the figures of driver assaults are appalling, but a driver should be free to choose whether to have a system installed, or whether to not have CCTV – and even then the local council should not be sitting down and working out what CCTV systems are acceptable, this, in my view, has nothing to do with them. All they need put on any condition of license is some silly line about if CCTV equipment is fitted it must be in line with guidance issued by the ICO. Thereby ending the local authorities responsibility.
Giving a local authority powers to decide things like camera systems fitted to taxis or indeed powers such as RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) is broadly similar to Enid Blyton giving Noddy an assault rifle. In general, a councillor’s biggest decision usually surrounds the dunking of biscuits during council meetings – not the security of a cab driver, or what any of us put in our rubbish bin.
source:
http://www.national-taxi-association.co.uk/?p=4996
Login
Register
FAQ
