Watched over or over-watched? Open street CCTV in Australia

Most developed countries, Australia included, are witnessing increased government and public concerns about crime and security. Amid these anxieties, closed circuit television (CCTV) systems to monitor public spaces are increasingly being touted as a solution to problems of crime and disorder. The city of Perth established Australia’s first open street closed circuit television system in July 1991. Subsequently, there has been significant expansion. At the end of 2002 Australia had 33 “open street” CCTV schemes. Based on site inspections, extensive reviews of documentation and interviews with 22 Australian administrators, this article discusses issues relating to system implementation, management and accountability.We also suggest ways relevant authorities might ensure that current and future schemes are appropriately audited and evaluated. We argue that rigorous independent assessment of both the intended and unintended consequences of open street CCTV is essential to ensure this measure is not deployed inappropriately. Finally, this article suggests any potential crime prevention benefits must be carefully weighed against the potential of CCTV to exacerbate social division and exclusion

Maximum-Likelihood Comparisons of Tully-Fisher and Redshift Data: Constraints

We compare Tully-Fisher (TF) data for 838 galaxies within cz = 3000 km s \Gamma1 from the Mark III catalog to the peculiar velocity and density fields predicted from the 1.2 Jy IRAS redshift survey. Our goal is to test the relation between the galaxy density and velocity fields predicted by gravitational instability theory and linear biasing, and thereby to estimate fi I j\Omega 0:6 =b I ; where b I is the linear bias parameter for IRAS galaxies on a 300 km s \Gamma1 scale. Adopting the IRAS velocity and density fields as a prior model, we maximize the likelihood of the raw TF observables, taking into account the full range of selection effects and properly treating triple-valued zones in the redshiftdistance relation. Extensive tests with realistic simulated galaxy catalogs demonstrate that the method produces unbiased estimates of fi I and its error. When we apply the method to the real data, we model the presence of a small but significant velocity quadrupole residual (¸ 3.3%..