>The general fear level of the local population seems to be the biggest factor in all of this. I went from a place where people would do the quadruple check car lock routine when walking into the grocery store, to a place where many leave their unlocked vehicles idling in the parking lot. I don't even think about locking my doors at home now. It almost feels silly to do it around here. It's amazing the difference that ~65 miles can make.
It's not even that. The real shitholes full o' crime have scant cameras because you don't need them for "real" investigations of "real" crime. You only need a traffic cameras to establish what you need for a murder investigation or whatever, pair the images with cell time stamps and presto.
Cameras are for making it cheap to enforce the long tail of petty deviance that doesn't actually matter. Karen calls up bitching that some guy did something, normally that would be discarded because it's not worth it. But with a camera system they can query it and maybe fine the guy from their desks. They're not using the system to go after someone for stealing from parked cars except perhaps to walk back in time and add charges to someone they already got (same reason they ask for serial numbers of electronics and the like when doing theft investigations they won't follow up on).
It's not even that. The real shitholes full o' crime have scant cameras because you don't need them for "real" investigations of "real" crime. You only need a traffic cameras to establish what you need for a murder investigation or whatever, pair the images with cell time stamps and presto.
Cameras are for making it cheap to enforce the long tail of petty deviance that doesn't actually matter. Karen calls up bitching that some guy did something, normally that would be discarded because it's not worth it. But with a camera system they can query it and maybe fine the guy from their desks. They're not using the system to go after someone for stealing from parked cars except perhaps to walk back in time and add charges to someone they already got (same reason they ask for serial numbers of electronics and the like when doing theft investigations they won't follow up on).