People stealing copper from public infrastructure in public spaces is exactly the sort of serious quality-of-life crime that I want something like Flock cameras to deter.
There's really no stopping a guy from stealing scrap metal if he thinks it'll pay for his next fix.
It's like when you try to keep something from being taken by bolting it down and they just come in and steal the bolts too. Some of that's just a part of life.
The ostensible purpose of the criminal justice system is to stop guys from stealing scrap metal obtained by vandalizing public structures in order to buy drugs. Perhaps by arresting them and locking them in a building with armed guards so they can't vandalize and steal things and also can't get drugs anyway.
Insofar as the actual criminal justice system is doing a bad job with this, I want it to do a better job - which may entail "use more public security cameras to detect copper thieves" - and not just accept that pieces of infrastructure in public places might get vandalized and stolen by drug addicts.
It'd be nice to live in a world where the criminal justice system used technologies like these to help prevent theft and vandalism.
And to a certain extent, in our reality, they do.
The problem comes from the fact that these technologies also enable surveillance at a massive scale, and that we have a long history (not only as a country, but as a species) of people abusing these technologies for human rights violations.
When you have the likes of Donald Trump in charge of the country's law enforcement, and he's routinely working with the likes of Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel, all without consequences for the human rights abuses, well, you just can't have things like this. When children use a toy to misbehave, you take the toy away, and that's essentially what's happening here.
Now, if we were to have an actual national dialogue about these abuses and the responsible parties started suffering consequences for their actions, I'd be more open to the use of these tools. But we haven't and likely won't, so...
If you're comfortable taking on the role of a parent disciplining their child and imposing consequences on misbehaving children, then why not be comfortable with taking on that role against drug addicts stealing copper? The inability to have a copper item out in public because a thief would vandalize and steal it is as much a human rights abuse as being falsely accused of stealing copper by the cops because of public surveillance footage (or whatever specific eventuality you're worried as a result of surveillance cameras existing). Is it a different constitutional framework of laws, a different criminal justice system, that detects and punishes the drug-addicted copper-thief and the corrupt law enforcement official?
