[iceyest]

Wow, I had no idea it was this bad. I am not really suprised the lengths American spying goes though. Glad not to be living in New York.

>The Domain Awareness System is the largest digital surveillance system in the world

I wonder how it compares to China and if facial recognition tech is as pervasive in America as it is in China.

[pfortuny]

There’s London too, totally dystopian.

[vidarh]

Most cameras in the UK are private, rarely working well, and usually not networked or easily accessible to the police. It could be better, but the idea of the UK as a surveillance state is seriously overblown outside of maybe a handful of streets.

[fennecbutt]

Not really. I got mugged quite close to a tube station in relatively central London and no CCTV footage, so all the cameras are useless.

I was on a jury for a court case where: the incident was caught by a bus camera, but the police waited 6 months to ask for footage, footage is deleted after 1 month and they know this. The shop across the road captured the incident on CCTV but the cop had "tech problems" trying to transfer the video file to his laptop - even then they didn't even bother to sign a document stating what they saw in the video.

CCTV and cops (at least in and around London) are just totally useless. And the gov is useless too, "fighting" crime rather than addressing what causes crimes.

Otherwise, it's not too bad a place to live for a travelling Kiwi, great launchpad into Europe, oh wait they fucked that up with Brexit, too.

[ted_bunny]

Partly just a product of its street layout. They need a lot more cameras to get the same amount of coverage that a grid-based city would need, since vantage is so poor.

[lupire]

It's frustrating how Wikipedia phrases unvalidated claims as facts instead of claims. NYC government claiming something doesn't make it true.

[janalsncm]

In America we get the worst of both worlds: police won’t admit to domestic spying so they can’t use to solve day to day crimes. But they still spy on us, Constitution be damned.

As a result the US has a higher crime rate than many other countries including China. If you don’t trust China’s numbers look at Singapore, which has a population density similar to NYC with an order of magnitude less crime. Singapore is safer at night than NYC is during the day. Why? Cameras. If you commit an offense, you will be caught, without question.

[mrcartmeneses]

Singapore isn’t safe “because cameras” it’s safe because it has high social mobility, social housing, high levels of education, high levels of income equality and is generally wealthy and much wealthier than its neighbours.

And also it’s a police state where you get sentenced to death for drug smuggling and can be punished for doing drugs in another country while on holiday if you are a citizen, for example.

To the naive, Singapore is a paradise, but once you visit for long enough you realise it’s just a super nice prison and it’s not very fun being with the other lags

[observationist]

Not that US institutions don't lie, but our bureaucracy and government oversight systems come with the benefit that many of the things we track and document can be verified. Other countries simply lie. The numbers you get are not a rough approximation of reality; they're simply part of whatever story that country wants to tell.

Crime rate is a statistic for which a majority of countries provide numbers that are completely dissociated from reality.

You can, of course, take the numbers seriously, as if the statistics are being published in good faith. Unless you have some sort of independent oversight, however, that isn't beholden to or biased by the country being assessed, then taking those numbers seriously is probably a silly thing to do.

The US gets lots of independent verification and validation of crime statistics. They're frequently analyzed at local, state, and federal level by journalists, students, activists, authors, and government officials. At every level an official number is published, it gets challenged, so there are incentives keeping the politicians and bureaucrats honest. They get slammed when they get caught lying, and they get caught lying because the public and the media keep track of things and demand accountability.

Some stuff, like total officer involved shootings, dog shootings by officials, abuses of power, and things of that nature, don't get publicly disclosed much of the time, so there are gaps in what we know and what officials are required to disclose.

The US isn't perfect, but you can get pretty good numbers that actually correlate with reality. Even other western countries don't always have trustworthy reporting and accounting for government actions. The best you'll ever get is a glowing narrative.

[vundercind]

Same with national ID and our fear of “papers, please”. We have all the downsides—constantly having to provide ID to everyone, government can trivially access all kinds of tracking data tied to that—but none of the benefits of an actual national ID because we have to pretend we don’t have one (we do, it’s just 80% privatized and a massive liability and inconvenience for citizens in ways that it doesn’t need to be)

[lupusreal]

I think Singapore whipping the shit out of criminals probably has a lot to do with it. Not just Singapore, but most of the rest of Asian countries as well. South Korea treats their prisoners so harshly that the US military has to have a special agreement in place to ensure that US servicemen imprisoned for crimes by South Korea actually get fed more than a starvation diet and don't have to do hard labor: https://www.stripes.com/migration/for-u-s-inmates-in-s-korea...

Of course South Koreans know better than American soldiers not to commit crimes in South Korea, because prison there is so awful. Unsurprisingly they have a much lower crime rate than America.

[kube-system]

> Singapore is safer at night than NYC is during the day. Why? Cameras. If you commit an offense, you will be caught, without question.

There's more to it than that. A sheisty will defeat a camera.

[AvocadoPanic]

Is it the catching or the imprisoning NYC and many other cities are struggling with in current year?

[winrid]

Yeah I would want to better understand how they arrived at that statement.

When I was in Xinjiang there were like 5-10 cameras at every intersection. Surely NYC isn't at that level?

[dpkirchner]

I don't know about NYC but it's common to see at least 4 cameras per lighted intersection where I am (small city in the PNW). They're replacing the loops used to sense vehicles, but I'm pretty sure they're also remotely accessible.

[postalrat]

You had no idea it was so bad? You do know how mobile phones work and what is tracked don't you?