Eric Lombardo: Society would be safer if we had security cameras in public places to catch potential criminals

7. Society would be safer if we had security cameras in public places to catch potential criminals I do not agree with this statement. Society would only seem more secure. On the outside this seems great: get mugged? Simple, just watch the video and follow the person home. We would be able to catch more criminals. But it would also be a huge nuisance. We all jaywalk; we sometimes park in the wrong zones or try to cheat the meter reader out of some fine money. But do we really want all of this to be caught? And this would not help prevent crimes. If you are mugged, you are still mugged; you just know who did it. But you are not any safer; you will simply be able to punish criminals more easily. Of course this also infringes on some rights. How is it possible to see only public places? Does this mean that you cannot see through windows into homes? Private spaces would also be affected. Another question this brings up: what type of criminal would this breed? Would it weed out more casual criminals? Would it leave only more desperate people willing to kill or steal rather than just snatch a purse? And how much time would be spent watching for minor, easy to catch, infringements rather than more major crimes, which would, on the whole, be better planned for and more serious? It would seem to me that this would give us the illusion but not the reality of security. We have cameras in malls, in schools, but this doesn’t deter crime, it still occurs, so would there be an actual advantage to taking the time and the effort to install security cameras in every public place, and to hire the manpower it would require to watch the cameras at the same time?