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Town asks ‘volunteers’ to man the CCTV room

CCTV standing This is not the first time we've seen a local council decide to use members of public to do their snooping dirty work, but we had rather hoped we'd seen the last of it.

As the Wiltshire Gazette explains:

The town council and Malmesbury & Villages Community Partnership (M&VCAP) are working on a project aimed at improving safety in the town.

The existing CCTV will be moved from the town hall to the police station soon, and volunteers will be asked to monitor the system during periods requested by the police.

Ray Sanderson said: “Those interested should be prepared to work in pairs over a four-hour period and agree to abide by a CCTV police code of conduct.

“In addition an enhanced Criminal Records Bureau check on all volunteers will be needed."

I assume Ray is from the delightfully acronymed M&VCAP and thus I tread carefully…

Ray; a code of conduct is simply not enough and don't even get me started on all the problems with a CRB check. The kind of people who would want to spy on their neighbours are exactly the sort of people you don't want watching a town's CCTV network.

If you can't even afford to get professionals to run your own surveillance, turn it off and do everyone in Malmesbury a favour.

By Dylan Sharpe

Posted on August 12, 2010 by Big Brother Watch Posted in CCTV
  • NeverSurrender

    I am going to start carrying a roll of Duck tape and a telescopic pole with me everywhere I go. I shall tear off a strip of tape, put it on the end of the pole and then reach up and stick it over the CCTV lens. Let’s start a campaign to put these cameras out of action so that we can get back to normality again.

  • tacitus

    I’m aware of volunteers met police volunteers monitoring cctv in Stoke Newington too.

  • http://www.ggm11.plus.com Geoffrey Madden

    Sussex Police Authority are currently boasting about their oversight of video-surveillance by their force, together with whom they are now supposedly promising “guarantees that protect ctizens’ privacy ahd fundamental liberties”. Anyone wishing to judge how much faith might be put in the lead member of the Authority responsible for this could skip to the end of a YouTube video by ggm11 entitled “Are Sussex Police Authority leading Europe?”