Big Brother awakens in Nice
By the end of the year, there will be 626 surveillance cameras in the streets of Nice (432 are in place already) providing live feeds to a centre nicknamed the “Observatory”. Here, everyone will be monitored for illegal or anti-social behavior.
In an interview with Nice Matin, deputy mayor Benoît Kandel defends the ‘independent’ observatory and claims it catches a lot of crimes that the police miss. In just over three months its reports allegedly led to 88 arrests for crimes from scooter theft to selling drugs.
Wikipedia gives the population of Nice as 347,900, which gives 1.8 camera per 1000 inhabitants. This brings us above London level of CCTV, except for Lambeth, Camden and Wandsworth (the latter a whopping 4 cameras per 1000 people). For comparison, Paris has only 326 cameras in total.
We notice that there is no camera outside Blue Whales pub, where most violent crime appears to take place in the Old Town, so we are not sure what criteria was used for camera placement.
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[...] rather continues the drive to maximise revenue through penalising minor offenses. As the number of CCTV cameras expands, we can expect this to roll out city-wide. Share (No Ratings Yet) Loading [...]
[...] trample on the civil liberties he is supposed to be protecting. Is there really the need to install 626 CCTV cameras in Nice? Supposedly there to “protect us” and only for cracking down on delinquency and crime, [...]