[FYI] Violent City of Video Surveillance

[Kristian Köhntopp <kris@koehntopp.de>]

Sicher fühlen in der Stadt der Kameras?

http://cbsnews.cbs.com/now/story/0,1597,210074-412,00.shtml

Crime Wave Sweeps Britain 
Violent Crime May Be Up As Much As 19 Percent 
Lax Sentencing May Contribute to Increase 
Fear Is That Guns Will Infiltrate British Society 

LONDON
(CBS) Despite its reputation as a
genteel and pleasant land, a new
government report depicts Britain as
one of the most violent urban societies
in the Western world, a place where a
person's chances of being assaulted,
burgled or robbed are substantially
greater than in the United States. 

People outside of the UK are most
familiar with the violence of British
soccer fans, who recently disrupted the
Euro 2000 tournament in Belgium. But
CBS News Senior European
Correspondent Tom Fenton reports
that while violent crime in America
has been going down for 20 years, the
latest government study shows that it is
on the rise in Britain itself. 

A person is more likely to be burglarized, 
almost twice as likely to be robbed,
and two-and-a-half times more likely 
to be assaulted there than in America. 

The British Broadcasting Corporation 
reports that the Home Office's
yet-to-be-released figures are expected 
to show a 19 percent increase in
violent crime nationwide from March 
1999-March 2000, with robberies in
London jumping 38 percent. 

Those figures belie police crime statistics, 
which show lower incidences of
violence. Stats released in February, for 
example, suggested an overall drop
of 1 percent in crime nationwide. 

But British police statistics are deeply 
flawed, as only one in four assaults ever
gets recorded. The reality is the streets 
and shopping malls of Britain are a
battleground. 

In one case getting media coverage in London, 
an American schoolteacher
on a class trip to London was drugged and 
raped over the weekend. Police
have asked the public for help identifying a suspect. 

...

-- 
"The lawyers won't solve this and the technologist won't solve 
 this piracy problem," Griffin said. "Anyway, anything that a 
 41-year-old thinks up, a 14-year-old can undo." 
	-- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,37151,00.html