since the murder of anna lindh, photos from the surveillance cameras in down-town stockholm have been all over the news papers, depicting the man who, presumably, committed the crime. this have raised the issue, once again, about the goods and bads of surveillance cams. according to the national council for crime prevention, there has been a substantial increase in application of permits for using surveillance cameras; in january 2003, the toal number of granted or sought permits were 9300, while in 1995, the same figure was 5000 (all according to this article).

and now to my point with this post. combine the effort spent in hunting down anna lindh's killer with the paranoia of people who are afraid of getting caught on tape, and what do you get? nuthin. there's no reason to be afraid of the cameras. look at it this way; the best (i assume) policemen and policewomen are working, as i write this, on analysing the hundreds of hours (so the news papers say) worth of video tape from the afternoon that lindh got stabbed, and they still aren't sure that the man they've arrested is the same man that appears on the video taken by the cams in the store. so, what if a less severe crime was committed, do you think that the one, or possibly two, officers that were to look through the tape would actually catch the perpetrator? don't think so, unless the perpetrator is a very clumsy one.