Aren‘t you glad Big Brother is watching you?

Aug. 10, 2005

What do you do when your small town can’t afford a full-time cop, but has a crime wave to contend with?
For McBain in southern Missaukee County, the answer may be more surveillance. The town council is considering installing up to 25 video cameras to keep an eye on every corner of McBain on a 24/7 basis.
Like many small towns in Northern Michigan, the 1,000 residents of McBain depend on their county’s sheriff department for protection. But there are only six full-time uniformed officers in the county and they have to cover the metropolis of Lake City in addition to other small towns. Unfortunately, like many rural communities, McBain also has its share of jerks bent on vandalism, B and arson.
As reported on Channel 7/4 News, the town council hopes that installing video cameras to watch over McBain will take a bite out of crime. The 24-hour digital recordings could be retrieved to catch little Johnny spray-painting the elementary school or smashing a drug store window.
Back in a more innocent (and naive) time, there would have been howls of protest over such a plan, with the specter of “Big Brother is watching you” and protests of a looming police state.
But that, as they say, was then, and this is now.
I recall Detroit’s underground press raising cries of alarm when Wayne State University’s public safety department installed video cameras on campus back in the mid-’70s. Fearful thoughts of malevolent cops watching the every move of students slouching around campus portended a vast Orwellian police state.
But that attitude soon evaporated due to a plague of rapes and assaults in alleys and parking decks around WSU. Students quickly came to value the cameras and the alarm boxes indicated by blue lights on poles around campus. The cameras gave students at least the sensation of greater security.
Did the cameras help decrease rapes and robberies? I don’t know; more likely crime went down due to the bulldozing of hundreds of acres of slums around the campus to expand Detroit’s Medical Center. But I’ll bet that WSU students and Detroit’s alternative press would raise one hell of a howl today if the university decided to pull its cameras from the campus.
That’s progress for you.
Despite the fears of civil libertarians, the whole police state/Big Brother threat of video surveillance in public places has turned out to be so much dogwash. What cop has got the time or inclination to watch for potential mopes on camera for years at a time? A far greater fear for most citizens is that no one will be watching if and when you are assaulted in a parking lot under the gaze of a video camera.
Meijer’s in Traverse City is a good example. There are video screens mounted right next to the store’s exits with cameras surveilling the parking lot. But who is watching? I imagine you could have 300 Hells Angels roll in and torch every car in the lot before anyone would notice on those cameras.
At best, video cameras have value in deterring crime or identifying criminals.
It’s said that London has more video surveillance cameras than any city in the world, watching virtually every street and subway. That obviously didn’t stop the subway bombings, but perhaps the digital images gathered will help track down the remaining terrorists.
As for McBain, other communities in Northern Michigan should follow the progress of its experiment in digital deterrence. Perhaps once the word gets around that your film clip could end up on a local version of “Cops” or “America’s Most Wanted,” some of our region’s bad actors will decide to skip their screen test.

The fabricated film fest

Why did our local news media knock itself silly trying to legitimize the right-wing Traverse Bay Freedom FilmFest when it was clearly a dud and a political stunt from the get-go?
The amount of media CPR that went into trying to breathe life into this turkey would have been considered “heroic measures“ in any emergency room in the land.
To put this in perspective, reportedly, just eight people turned out to see the Freedom FilmFest’s showing of “Top Gun,” which was its premier film. That’s eight, as in number 8. Eight. And only 15 people turned out to view “On the Waterfront” (a liberal-values film whose star and director were notorious liberals, by the way).
By comparison, the Traverse City Film Festival spearheaded by Michael Moore drew 50,000 ecstatic viewers, with full houses at the 600-seat State Theatre and 6,000 or more at each free showing at the Open Space.
It was like comparing a flea to the Space Shuttle, yet local news media gave each event equal weight in its coverage.
For instance, the Record-Eagle published 11 articles on the Freedom FilmFest, well in excess of its consequence given the number of attendees. And despite its founder’s hate speech about family-and-Christian-hating extremist liberals, the paper promoted the notion in a headline that Michael Moore was an “extremist” while Genie Aldrich was “mainstream,” when the reverse was obviously true in the court of public opinion. Perhaps the headline was the paper‘s stab at irony, but if so, it was so faint and inscrutable that a host of angry letter writers didn‘t get it.
Then too, local television reports gave each festival equal time, as if they were somehow comparable. A viewer would assume from the TV coverage that the Freedom FilmFest was a mild success instead of a complete failure that was shunned by the public. In fact, the Park Place venue was as forlorn as a funeral parlour. One TV news report showed teens at Horizon Cinema lining up for a film with no indication that they were most likely there to see “The Devil’s Rejects” or “The Island,” rather than “Top Gun.” That was dishonest reporting.
One problem with pumping so much hot air into a non-event is that it serves to attract the attention of the Eric Rudolph types of the far-right‘s lunatic fringe. These stories are now plastered all over the Internet with a false spin that‘s completely removed from reality, and that‘s bad for Northern Michigan.
If an anti-immigrant “patriot“ from Manistee came to Traverse City and set up an alternative to the National Cherry Festival because she didn’t like the Mexican migrants who pick our fruit, would our local media be as obliging and kind as they were to the outside backers of the recent right-wing disaster?
Or could it be that our local media is just so clueless that they don’t know that there are certain standards to qualify as a film festival in the first place? Little things like innovation, artistic genius, credible judges, exciting new films, the thrill of glamor... all of the things which were evident at Moore’s festival, but lacking at the fake event.
These hoked-up TV and print stories should be entered in a journalism contest along with an accountant‘s tally of who actually attended the dud event. No doubt those stories would win first prize... for fabrication.