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Is there any research that proves the causal relationship between surveillance and crime rate ? I've been constantly shut up with this statement "Don't you want

by amrrs 8y ago

Is there any research that proves the causal relationship between surveillance and crime rate ? I've been constantly shut up with this statement "Don't you want your country to be safe" when I talk about privacy intrusion by Govt .

notanum 8y ago
It's classified
- setquk 8y ago
  Based on this leak, probably not for long
_cs2017_ 8y ago
There's no convincing research that establishes causality on such complex sociological matters, since you can't create clean experiments, and observations are not useful since there are too many confounding factors. However, you don't really need research on this, it's obvious that surveillance offers meaningful safety benefits. I think the problem some people have with surveillance is that its costs may outweigh its benefits. For example surveillance can be used to shift political system in the authoritarian direction, by suppressing political opposition. It can be used to sustain inequality since it provides those with money or power a powerful leverage to entrench their positions. It can be used by corrupt officials and hackers to commit serious crimes (partly offsetting its crime reduction benefits). Finally, even if surveillance isn't abused, it can be uncomfortable to some people who just don't like being watched.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  > partly offsetting its crime reduction benefits No, potentially outweighing them. There is no reason to think surveillance cannot enable more crime than it solves, and the more surveillance you have the more likely that gets.
  - _cs2017_ 8y ago
    Possibly. Although if I have to guess, the new crimes it enables are less destructive than the ones it catches. As an example, a mugger has a risk of killing or seriously injuring the person. On the other hand, someone who steals surveillance data for blackmail purposes will not cause nearly as much harm.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  > it's obvious that surveillance offers meaningful safety benefits. Is it, though? As far as I know, most crime is of the "spur of the moment" type, decided on the stop, without much regard for the consequences. Thus, I'd expect more surveillance to be able to increase the odds of getting caught, but to not actually reduce the amount of crime. I'd also be ware for increased surveillance to hamper the ability to correct "wrong" laws.
  - _cs2017_ 8y ago
    Oh you're right, I didn't think about it. I take it back, it's not that obvious that it offers meaningful safety benefits. Still, I suppose if the probability of being caught goes from 1% to over 50%, it might be enough to scare off even the spur of the moment criminals. Also, a decent fraction of crimes are at least somewhat planned or even repeated, and those should be affected by the chance of being caught. On the other hand, there are also more things I didn't think about. Suppose surveillance actually catches all car thieves. Will most of them go get a job? Or will they just switch to crimes that are harder to detect with surveillance? My guess is that most criminals will either stop committing crimes or spend most of their life in jail. But I may underestimate the creativity and capability of criminals.
chii 8y ago
I do believe higher levels of surveillance will have higher levels of inhibition for petty crime. But it will not inhibit white collar crime (such as corruption or fraud etc). It won't inhibit crimes of passion. And it won't inhibit premeditated crimes that require lots of planning and hardcore execution (like drug/human trafficking etc).
- pishpash 8y ago
  Apparently the appearance of surveillance was enough. "The cardboard cutout cop": https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/08/10/the-cardboard-cutout-cop-there-psychology-there/xYmonJYU95jxrMb78Xae4J/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/08/10/the-cardboard-c...
knolan 8y ago
I guess you could look at major European cities like London where CCTV is pervasive and other cities with considerably less. It seems to me that most of the justification for surveillance systems is focused on edge cases, terrorism and paedophilia which are statistically unlikely of affect the vast majority of people. If you watch some of the reality TV you see in UK about CCTV surveillance you’d think the county is suffering from a crime epidemic when in fact a lot of the situations are minor and often escalated by overly aggressive police officers interacting with uneducated angry drunk people. Better social policy regarding education and alcohol would be the better solution.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  If you watch reality TV then you aren't getting the facts.
  - knolan 8y ago
    Of course, it’s not something I would normally watch. It is however very popular with my parents generation. They get very invested in the whole idea of the world falling apart when the data shows that crime is falling.
    - pmontra 8y ago
      Maybe because of the "it was better when we were young" kind of ideas? Obviously it was and it will be for us too. We were younger, healthier, stronger and living in the environment we were raised into, not something made by younger and unfathomable minds.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    I've seen some English reality / cop TV, it's entertaining enough - mostly because most of the crime shown there is benign, like idk, people driving without a license or drunk people. They probably make those shows on purpose though, showing on the one side that crime isn't that bad, and on the other to remind people to keep their insurance up to date because the cops are watching.
- 8y ago
raxxorrax 8y ago
No expert on US law, but I think mass surveillance is illegal. So yes, there is a very direct connection between surveillance and criminality.
Maxxmax 8y ago
There's an amazing movie created by 101 East on the topic of China's surveillance, called "China's spying Eyes", you can find it on youtube or AlJazeera homepage. For the sake of security, like in Hobbessian Leviathan, the citizens have sacrificed all of their freedoms to a monster, a state and this sacrifice is not proportional. The topic was once proposed by https://www.effectivepapers.com/ https://www.effectivepapers.com/ and now, investigating even further, it becomes apparent that not only Chinese govt heads to that direction. EU anti immigration programs, implementation of AI at the customs, etc. Those commiting crimes will find the way to do that, while the ordinary people will pay the price. Finally, for the states this a zero-sum game and always win.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
An argument can be made that any prevented crimes are not published, with the intent of lulling would-be criminals or terrorists into a safe sense of security - that is, that communicating via a certain platform is safe enough, not knowing the NSA is listening in. And on the other hand, what makes you feel safer: no news at all, or "1000 potential terrorist threats thwarted through surveillance". The former is dull, but dull is good right? The latter is stressful on both sides, on the one hand that apparently there are at least 1000 terrorists active - and what about the ones they didn't catch - and on the other that the government is listening. So that's my theory; if government surveillance is effective, it's kept under wraps so it remains effective.
- viraptor 8y ago
  > An argument can be made that any prevented crimes are not published Between the police fighting for funding, media fighting for content (Florida man), and police force for recognition (police posing with stashes of money/drugs/guns), I'm not sure there's much strategic hiding going on.
DanielBMarkham 8y ago
There are hidden assumptions in the question "Don't you want your country to be safe?" What the question is really asking is this: "Don't you want your country to be safe no matter what?" No, I do not. I want my country to be a place where I am proud of living. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to have traditions that are important to me that stay the same over time and try to get better over time. I want my country to stay a place I am happy living in. I can live with some danger much easier than I can a surveillance state. Danger is a situation that is stable over time. Operating a panopticon is not. The second premise is that it is possible to make some universal rules that will make everybody safe. Throughout history we have lots of examples of places where large groups of people were "completely" controlled. Modern prisons in the U.S. are a good contemporary example. These places are not safe. In fact, the tighter we grip a population in order to make them safe, the more we create criminals who are part of the surveillance system itself. These criminals are in many cases impossible to discover. So now you have a lot of control and surveillance with criminals you can't identify or catch. The Chinese deal with this by every now and then sacrificing some of the party apparatchiks to the mob. The jury is still out on whether that actually works over several decades or not. I doubt it. But even if it did, it's still an unstable system. Nations don't exist to extol one virtue over all others. "Safety" is a great thing, but it's not the end of the conversation when it comes to decision-making. It's a complex balance that should dynamically change over time as conditions force. When you systematize things like massive surveillance, you actually hurt the cause of public safety. It gets better for a short while -- then the rebound happens. And it's not pretty.
- analog31 8y ago
  Indeed, safety also has different aspects. You might be safer from getting mugged, but less safe from getting arrested and tortured, run over by a car, or from breathing polluted air and getting cancer. The same apparatus that makes people afraid to be muggers, will also make them afraid to point out abuses.
- dqpb 8y ago
  There are way more hidden assumptions than just "Don't you want your country to be safe no matter what?". What's really happening when you agree to surveillance, is you're agreeing to give power in the form of information asymmetry to people you don't know. You assume those people will use that power for your benefit. In reality, there is very little guarantee that that's true - though there is some statistical likelihood that it's true. At the end of the day, there is no such thing as law and order, no such thing as values and ethics, no such thing as society and civilization. All there really is is groups of people with varying levels of power and cohesion, varying overlap of shared interests, rather predictable human nature, and game theory. If you lose sight of that, you do so at your own peril.
entity345 8y ago
Well, a policeman on the beat or patrolling in a car is surveillance. Based on that surveillance does work. The question is rather at what level surveillance does not meaningfully reduce crime anymore but becomes a (political) control tool.
- wetpaws 8y ago
  In my country I'm more afraid of police than of thugs, tbh
- raxxorrax 8y ago
  I still differentiate between public and private spaces. I do believe surveillance and the threat of surveillance does heavily undermine public trust in a society and its institutions and that this can be easily deduced by reasoning. Good thing trust is not an issue in 2019... Ever wondered why so many constitutions around the world forbid surveillance? I believe the studies about people becoming dumber...

by amrrs 8y ago

notanum 8y ago

It's classified

setquk 8y ago
Based on this leak, probably not for long

_cs2017_ 8y ago

There's no convincing research that establishes causality on such complex sociological matters, since you can't create clean experiments, and observations are not useful since there are too many confounding factors. However, you don't really need research on this, it's obvious that surveillance offers meaningful safety benefits. I think the problem some people have with surveillance is that its costs may outweigh its benefits. For example surveillance can be used to shift political system in the authoritarian direction, by suppressing political opposition. It can be used to sustain inequality since it provides those with money or power a powerful leverage to entrench their positions. It can be used by corrupt officials and hackers to commit serious crimes (partly offsetting its crime reduction benefits). Finally, even if surveillance isn't abused, it can be uncomfortable to some people who just don't like being watched.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
> partly offsetting its crime reduction benefits No, potentially outweighing them. There is no reason to think surveillance cannot enable more crime than it solves, and the more surveillance you have the more likely that gets.
- _cs2017_ 8y ago
  Possibly. Although if I have to guess, the new crimes it enables are less destructive than the ones it catches. As an example, a mugger has a risk of killing or seriously injuring the person. On the other hand, someone who steals surveillance data for blackmail purposes will not cause nearly as much harm.
Vinnl 8y ago
> it's obvious that surveillance offers meaningful safety benefits. Is it, though? As far as I know, most crime is of the "spur of the moment" type, decided on the stop, without much regard for the consequences. Thus, I'd expect more surveillance to be able to increase the odds of getting caught, but to not actually reduce the amount of crime. I'd also be ware for increased surveillance to hamper the ability to correct "wrong" laws.
- _cs2017_ 8y ago
  Oh you're right, I didn't think about it. I take it back, it's not that obvious that it offers meaningful safety benefits. Still, I suppose if the probability of being caught goes from 1% to over 50%, it might be enough to scare off even the spur of the moment criminals. Also, a decent fraction of crimes are at least somewhat planned or even repeated, and those should be affected by the chance of being caught. On the other hand, there are also more things I didn't think about. Suppose surveillance actually catches all car thieves. Will most of them go get a job? Or will they just switch to crimes that are harder to detect with surveillance? My guess is that most criminals will either stop committing crimes or spend most of their life in jail. But I may underestimate the creativity and capability of criminals.

chii 8y ago

I do believe higher levels of surveillance will have higher levels of inhibition for petty crime. But it will not inhibit white collar crime (such as corruption or fraud etc). It won't inhibit crimes of passion. And it won't inhibit premeditated crimes that require lots of planning and hardcore execution (like drug/human trafficking etc).

pishpash 8y ago
Apparently the appearance of surveillance was enough. "The cardboard cutout cop": https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/08/10/the-cardboard-cutout-cop-there-psychology-there/xYmonJYU95jxrMb78Xae4J/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/08/10/the-cardboard-c...

knolan 8y ago

I guess you could look at major European cities like London where CCTV is pervasive and other cities with considerably less. It seems to me that most of the justification for surveillance systems is focused on edge cases, terrorism and paedophilia which are statistically unlikely of affect the vast majority of people. If you watch some of the reality TV you see in UK about CCTV surveillance you’d think the county is suffering from a crime epidemic when in fact a lot of the situations are minor and often escalated by overly aggressive police officers interacting with uneducated angry drunk people. Better social policy regarding education and alcohol would be the better solution.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
If you watch reality TV then you aren't getting the facts.
- knolan 8y ago
  Of course, it’s not something I would normally watch. It is however very popular with my parents generation. They get very invested in the whole idea of the world falling apart when the data shows that crime is falling.
  - pmontra 8y ago
    Maybe because of the "it was better when we were young" kind of ideas? Obviously it was and it will be for us too. We were younger, healthier, stronger and living in the environment we were raised into, not something made by younger and unfathomable minds.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  I've seen some English reality / cop TV, it's entertaining enough - mostly because most of the crime shown there is benign, like idk, people driving without a license or drunk people. They probably make those shows on purpose though, showing on the one side that crime isn't that bad, and on the other to remind people to keep their insurance up to date because the cops are watching.
8y ago

raxxorrax 8y ago

No expert on US law, but I think mass surveillance is illegal. So yes, there is a very direct connection between surveillance and criminality.

Maxxmax 8y ago

There's an amazing movie created by 101 East on the topic of China's surveillance, called "China's spying Eyes", you can find it on youtube or AlJazeera homepage. For the sake of security, like in Hobbessian Leviathan, the citizens have sacrificed all of their freedoms to a monster, a state and this sacrifice is not proportional. The topic was once proposed by https://www.effectivepapers.com/ https://www.effectivepapers.com/ and now, investigating even further, it becomes apparent that not only Chinese govt heads to that direction. EU anti immigration programs, implementation of AI at the customs, etc. Those commiting crimes will find the way to do that, while the ordinary people will pay the price. Finally, for the states this a zero-sum game and always win.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

An argument can be made that any prevented crimes are not published, with the intent of lulling would-be criminals or terrorists into a safe sense of security - that is, that communicating via a certain platform is safe enough, not knowing the NSA is listening in. And on the other hand, what makes you feel safer: no news at all, or "1000 potential terrorist threats thwarted through surveillance". The former is dull, but dull is good right? The latter is stressful on both sides, on the one hand that apparently there are at least 1000 terrorists active - and what about the ones they didn't catch - and on the other that the government is listening. So that's my theory; if government surveillance is effective, it's kept under wraps so it remains effective.

viraptor 8y ago
> An argument can be made that any prevented crimes are not published Between the police fighting for funding, media fighting for content (Florida man), and police force for recognition (police posing with stashes of money/drugs/guns), I'm not sure there's much strategic hiding going on.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago

There are hidden assumptions in the question "Don't you want your country to be safe?" What the question is really asking is this: "Don't you want your country to be safe no matter what?" No, I do not. I want my country to be a place where I am proud of living. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to have traditions that are important to me that stay the same over time and try to get better over time. I want my country to stay a place I am happy living in. I can live with some danger much easier than I can a surveillance state. Danger is a situation that is stable over time. Operating a panopticon is not. The second premise is that it is possible to make some universal rules that will make everybody safe. Throughout history we have lots of examples of places where large groups of people were "completely" controlled. Modern prisons in the U.S. are a good contemporary example. These places are not safe. In fact, the tighter we grip a population in order to make them safe, the more we create criminals who are part of the surveillance system itself. These criminals are in many cases impossible to discover. So now you have a lot of control and surveillance with criminals you can't identify or catch. The Chinese deal with this by every now and then sacrificing some of the party apparatchiks to the mob. The jury is still out on whether that actually works over several decades or not. I doubt it. But even if it did, it's still an unstable system. Nations don't exist to extol one virtue over all others. "Safety" is a great thing, but it's not the end of the conversation when it comes to decision-making. It's a complex balance that should dynamically change over time as conditions force. When you systematize things like massive surveillance, you actually hurt the cause of public safety. It gets better for a short while -- then the rebound happens. And it's not pretty.

analog31 8y ago
Indeed, safety also has different aspects. You might be safer from getting mugged, but less safe from getting arrested and tortured, run over by a car, or from breathing polluted air and getting cancer. The same apparatus that makes people afraid to be muggers, will also make them afraid to point out abuses.
dqpb 8y ago
There are way more hidden assumptions than just "Don't you want your country to be safe no matter what?". What's really happening when you agree to surveillance, is you're agreeing to give power in the form of information asymmetry to people you don't know. You assume those people will use that power for your benefit. In reality, there is very little guarantee that that's true - though there is some statistical likelihood that it's true. At the end of the day, there is no such thing as law and order, no such thing as values and ethics, no such thing as society and civilization. All there really is is groups of people with varying levels of power and cohesion, varying overlap of shared interests, rather predictable human nature, and game theory. If you lose sight of that, you do so at your own peril.

entity345 8y ago

Well, a policeman on the beat or patrolling in a car is surveillance. Based on that surveillance does work. The question is rather at what level surveillance does not meaningfully reduce crime anymore but becomes a (political) control tool.

wetpaws 8y ago
In my country I'm more afraid of police than of thugs, tbh
raxxorrax 8y ago
I still differentiate between public and private spaces. I do believe surveillance and the threat of surveillance does heavily undermine public trust in a society and its institutions and that this can be easily deduced by reasoning. Good thing trust is not an issue in 2019... Ever wondered why so many constitutions around the world forbid surveillance? I believe the studies about people becoming dumber...