Monday, November 14, 2011
Continual Improvement is Good
I happened to come across a press release by MHA detailing recent efforts by the police force to improve its operations over time. It is good when improvement is sought. We are aware that response times are rather bad, evolution towards a better structure will drive performance to, itself, improve. To give credit where it is due, kudos to Wong Kan Seng.
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5 comments:
WKS no longer run MHA. It's now led by
DPM Teo Chee Hean.
With the increasing CCTV installed -
1) at/near MRTs
2) at/near entry/exit points of SG
3) at/near HDB void decks + carparks +seedy hotspots
I don't know if you're following the news closely, soon enough the entire island will be wired up by CCTV everywhere - much like Israel state. Is this what we want?
Installing more public CCTV is a further intrusion of privacy. It will only force illicit activities underground or inside premises and will only make crime-solving more difficult. Personally I oppose to such widespread reliance of CCTV as tool to deter crimes. Besides, how many resources are they allocating to effectively cull through all these tape-recording for evidence instead?
Yup, I'm aware of it. I'm also aware of the initiatives that were begun by him, like that of "rationalizing force structure" taking into account socio-economic changes. (... and noting that a look at the old organization would lead one to wonder.)
Similarly, Heng Swee Keat is not responsible for the "focus on values". It just announced by him.
On privacy, I think it is disturbing, but there is merit to "pushing illicit activity underground". I appeal to the "broken window effect", where the appearance that no one really cares that something is wrong stimulates undesirable behavior.
On scanning for "problems", I think some machine learning algorithm might be useful for automatic detection (a flurry of activity would be numerically recognizable, for instance). This might allow for automatic alerts that human operators can view and react to.
I think there is a lot more to this, both positive and negative.
Let's face it. The whole idea of CcTV is to catch the culprits in events of crimes/riots/uncivility.
The CCTV are not crime deterrent. They are just to facilitate the jobs to capture violators. The London riots are good example. The cameras didn't stop the acts from happening, but it certainly did help them capture the rioters in the aftermath. That's after scouring through thousand hours of video footages, and mostly by help of public identification. That
s the cover up by PAP. Now there're even more installed in the name of 'flood-prone areas". We are not stupid.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/17/why-cctv-does-not-deter-crime
I agree that if you're not acting rationally, CCTVs are no deterrent. However, accepting that people acting criminally are acting dominantly irrationally or not, we can reason that:
(i) when they are rational, the CCTVs do act as a deterrent
(ii) when they are irrational, it is likely that they may get violent, and there are chances of computational identification and rapid response (but this depends on whether there is the will to develop such intelligent monitoring systems)
In the absence of the systems mentioned in (ii), CCTVs are just creepy. (Haha...) Maybe their true purpose is to monitor for opposition block visits.
BTW, in flood prone areas.... flooding is super easy to detect automatically (computationally), so automatic alarms can be set up to go off when some number of independent detections go off.
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