How do you propose we combat crime?

Speaking personally, the first thing to do would be to end the drug war, which criminalizes vast amounts of the city's minority populations. Keep in mind the very first person busted by this surveillance system was somebody rolling a joint. That person, already tied into various illegal networks, is now probably in jail and consequently getting further alienated socially and financially from the above-ground, legal world (if they haven't been beaten to death already).

Of course, ending the drug war would put millions of people back out into the workforce, which would seriously threaten economic stability. I'd have to go with a program encouraging local community ownership of community business and resources, kind of a new deal for the inner city with a focus on building capital in the hands of local people. I imagine something like this on its own would probably go a long way towards reducing crime by itself.

"Beaten to Death" - ok. So, out of the thousands of people that get processed through central booking in one day, the police fuck up and "beat to death' one person. And now its an epidemic?

So you say end the war on drugs. How do you go about doing that? And yeah it's lame that weed is illegal, but if there is a drug dealer selling crack, or cocain, or heroin, or a drug that does nothing BUT destory communities - shit, I am not going to cry if he gets arrested, gets roughed up a bit. He is the asshole that wants to make a fast buck and he is willing to destroy his community in the process.

Since when did we start feeling sympathetic to murderers, drug dealers, and people willing to stab someone and rob them for $5?

Yes, I agree that it is a social construct, that there is racism, that people turn down this path because of the lack fo opportunities. But damn man, it isnt the only reason. There has to be accountability. Maybe instead of blaming everything around someone, how about blame that person.

Being an anarchist, living within an anarchist society means having respect for others around you, to each her own, cooperation, caring about the community. Cause that is about the only thing that could make it work. So I look at assholes that go around robbing people, mugging people, dealing drugs, killing poeple and say..if I were living in an anarchistic society and these people were acting this way I would hope my community would do something to address them. Do we baby them? Do we blame the society and say "oh, he didnt mean to beat that guys head in with a crowbar to steal his car. It is just because of our racist system." Fuck man. Get real.

The question here isn't whether someone who stabs someone to get $5 for their crack fix should or shouldn't be held accountable for their actions. We could debate(probably productively) the relative influences of individual will, systemic sociological and economic factors, and physiological addiction in determining violent anti-social behaivor.

The question also isn't whether or not our system of criminal "justice", either nationally (2 million incarcerated, overwhelmingly disproportionately non-white) or locally ("a system that is overwhelmed and broken", under federal investigation) is racist and fundamentally misguided.

The specific question I have regarding these cameras is what impact they will actually have in stabilizing the communities they have been placed in, and at what cost. Does a continuously flashing blue police light on a street corner make the surrounding neighborhood safer? Or does it just mark that neighborhood as criminal, as criminalized? Here we can look at the disparity between the discrete Homeland Security busy-work cameras in the downtown area(we see that massive cctv sure did a lot of good fighting terrorism in London, but I'm sure the installation contract was lucrative) and the permanently flashing cameras which are being strung up in the poorer neighborhoods. The latter seem to me to be playing into a strategy of "crime-fighting" which takes communities with problems, and effectively excises them from the body politic so they can be subjected to a (para)military logic of surveillance and control. And I don't think this kind of strategy can really succeed.

And this isn't even getting into the civil liberties and privacy issues....