Over at the Weston Mercury, there's a report about a grandfather badly beaten on a train station (warning: graphic photograph of injuries). The area should have been covered by CCTV, but it seems that it wasn't on.
This seems very like the situation in Malden reported earlier this week - where the CCTV wasn't working for most of the summer.
The point is that we become reliant on CCTV, thinking it makes us safe, when it doesn't, and we fail to make provision for alternative security measures when we need them.
Human error and system malfunctions are just a couple of the many reasons that we shouldn't be so dependent upon CCTV. So often, as I know from my time at the criminal Bar, the quality of the footage is not high enough to be of any use in court even when there is no operator or equipment failure.
The irony is that the story about the attack on the station, where CCTV failed to deter the attackers or assist the police in their capture, appeared today in the Weston Mercury – because only a week ago, the same newspaper ran an extended and thoughtful piece on the merits and drawbacks of CCTV (the author of the piece is pictured here, captured on CCTV in the area that obviously was working).
I wonder if he or his readers have changed their minds at all now.
By Alex Deane
Please send us any of your local stories about the Big Brother state, or about the failure of all this state intrusion and surveillance to actually protect us