The Musings of Harry

Seriously, you couldn’t make this up.

Soho was brought to a halt yesterday as hazmat teams scoured the area looking for the source of noxious fumes that were killing hundreds of residents. Sorry: did I say were killing hundreds of residents? I meant smelled kinda bad.

Yes; having evacuated the area and cordoned it off, emergency responders wearing breathing equipment heroically burst through the door of a Thai restaurant to find a rather bewildered chef stirring a large pot of chilli dip. With some confusion, the chef said he could understand why people who weren’t Thai wouldn’t recognise the smell, but that it didn’t smell like chemicals. This is eminently sensible, but in a world where my housemate’s farts send people running for cover, a little naive.

Still, we have something to be thankful for: as Bruce Schneier points out, had this been in the US, the authorities would have found something — anything — to charge the chef with, lest they look like fools. Here in the UK, we’re positively used to the Police twatting things up in an amusing fashion: life wouldn’t be the same without it.

I do so love it when hard research backs up my long held suspicions.

Geeklawyer was kind enough to send me a link to this story. In a nutshell: there doesn’t seem to be any meaningful correlation between the numbers of cameras operated by the Police and crime clean-up rates.

The number of cameras in each London borough was compared to the crime clean-up rate for that borough. The borough with the most cameras, Hackney (1,484 cameras), had an above average clean-up rate of 22.2%, but Brent (164 cameras) has the highest rate in London: 25.9%. Several boroughs with 700-900 cameras fail to reach the average of 21%, as do several other boroughs with only 100 or so. There is quite clearly no correlation here: cameras appear not to be substantively useful for solving crimes.

Some will say that cameras deter crimes in the first place, but I doubt this. The rise of the hoody strikes me as a rather obvious countermeasure to cameras, which are usually mounted overhead. Criminals seem to care so little about being caught on camera that enough footage of criminal activity has been produced to sustain several television programmes dedicated to exhibiting the antics of the underclass for light entertainment. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to see some research that includes this data too: the total rate of reported crime, the clean-up rate, and the number of cameras, plotted against date for each London borough and going back 20 years would be ideal.

Perhaps one day, when I don’t have a million other things to do, I will have a go!