John van Gurp

It’s that time of year again. The students are back. I love pretty much everthing about it! We shop at the Quinpool Center and it’s a hotbed for the big community of young people who migrate from all corners of the globe to attend our universities. We see them trying to re-create the comfort food Mom used to make, picking through the meager bokchoi pile or looking for some tabbouleh that has the right colour.

Read the rest or leave comments on my Halifax Herald blog

When someone is taking a photo - pose! Show your teeth even if you don’t feel particularly excited about being photographed. It makes pretty much every photo look good.

I’ve been monitoring the growth of closed circuit camera surveillance in downtown Halifax for a few years. It was just something that caught my attention and over 6 years or so this growth has occurred exactly as predicted. I even set up a website. Over this time I’ve been interview numerous times for my opinions and in that process have encountered the same questions, time after time:

• Why do you care? What are you doing wrong that makes surveillance a problem?
• If you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear.
• It’s unreasonable to expect privacy in public.
• Why are you so paranoid and suspicious?
• Etc….

Here’s a short response to one of the question posed recently in the Usenet newsgroup hfx.general in relation to an article in the Chronicle Herald about the proliferation of CCTV in downtown Halifax

Q: Just curious. If the police could afford to put a cop on every corner to ensure the public safety would you mind? Is it the being viewed part or the possible recording part of the video camera that bothers you?

A: No I would not want to live in a city where there was a cop on every corner. That would be indicative of either excessive crime or excessive police control. Really, having cops watch your every move would change people’s behaviour. It’s not that folks are breaking laws, it’s just that most adults (and probably kids) don’t like being constantly monitored and observed for compliance. We expect to be presumed capable and mature and honest, and having constant police supervision would be undesireable.

The second part of your question “to ensure public safety” suggested that if there was not a cop on every corner, public safety would be at risk and this situation simply does not exist in Halifax.

Yes there are problem spots. The Commons for instance, around Maynard and North and Agricola, outside some of the late night bars, etc. IMO each should be evaluated and through a public/police/city task force some kind of process should take place to see how the issues can be tackled. As it is there is no oversight, no control, no regulation and no accountability for the placement of either private or police CCTV in public places. None. I consider this wrong.

• Is there a place for CCTV in public? Yes there probably is.
• Should the police have complete and total freedom to place as many cameras as they want, wherever they want? No way.

The city will eventually resemble a prison yard. Canadian police forces have been on the receiving end of some heavy criticism for the collection of “intelligence data” on people they considered subverisves, who now in hindsight were/are peaceful social justice activists fight to protect the civil and human rights of honest citizens. Governments can easily lapse into fascist-like mindsets, especially in the face of the type of conservative paranoia evident in the wake of 9/11. People blindly accept the erosion of their privacy rights. It’s a mistake to allow your rights to be eroded without question. The citizens of a country should question governments and demand safeguards to ensure that they stay on the open, fair and accountable process track.

The loss of privacy through police and private CCTV in public spaces is widely acknowledged as a real and measureable loss.

Many authoritative groups and international think-tanks have documented it and have numerous studies and a great deal of documentary evidence to support this notion.

In closing, here’s a quote from Privacy International, “The justification for CCTV is seductive, but the evidence is not convincing. In a report to the Scottish Office on the impact of CCTV, Jason Ditton, Director of the Scottish Centre for Criminology, argued
that the claims of crime reduction are little more than fantasy. “All (evaluations and statistics) we have seen so far are wholly unreliable”, The British Journal of Criminology described the statistics as “….post hoc shoestring efforts by the untrained and self interested practitioner.”

ttp://www.privacyinternational.org/issues/cctv/statement.html

Cheers,
John

What’s with young men pinching their junk in public? Read more…

A horse ? Man I love the car!

Read my Chronicle Herald blog if you wish

Fuck golf - that’s all I have to say about that!

The cottage is all tight now. The carpenter’s work is done and I’m on my own now but have offers of help from a few friends, so that’s nice. I found an almost new Franklin fireplace in New Albany. It’s being offered for sale by a guy I knew through PWGSC Headquarters and the Treasury Board many years ago. Back in around 1995 or so I published a web site with surplus federal properties and also made a slide show presentation explaining how useful this could be. Almost no one in the department seemed to clue into it, except for this guy who recognized the potential and made a case. I’m not sure if it had any influence on the approach to online marketing of government real estate, and given the ponderously unimaginative way the organization thinks it probably made no difference at all but I digress….

The inside stairs are done and the patrtition walls are framed. The electrician is doing his thing this week. Heather and I are going down on Friday to scope things out and buy a few bundles of shingles and make up the lumber order for the deck, etc etc…

First thing is to get a small counter space and a sink and enclose a bedroom or two. Oh, and I need to move the outhouse to the new location. It’s just far enough away from the cottage as to be discreet, yet not so far one would panic on the way there. The woodshed will be between the outhouse and the cottage so folks can carry a stick or two on their way back. It leaves open the possibility of saying “I’m going to get some wood” instead of “I’m going to the outhouse”.

We attended a fundraiser for Sierra Leone this week. Very nice, with some moving talk by my friend Thomas Turay. See http://cdpeace.com

Biking continues to be much fun. Half the fun is pushing the skills and getting better on cornering, even after all these years.

Must leave for work now!

(photo credit to jadz)

The not so funny part:

My pal Norman Smythe died on Thursday June 7 at 52 years of age. He had cancer and lasted three years and he even called me on Tuesday night to say good bye. Before his diagnosis Norm was a prodigious drinker. My god how he could pound back the beer - it was really something to witness. He could do this night after night. What a pro!

He was a cantankerous, opinionated redneck wannabe, but at the same time was a gentle and kind softy with a heart of gold and you would never in your life find a more loyal friend. His friends at work meant the world to him and we became his family while he was sick. He had a constant stream of visitors who took him to appointments, went out for meals with him, listened to his complaints on those very rare occasions when he complained about his situation. We stayed with him in the hospital and shared a closeness that is very hard to describe. We loved Norm.

When he died his brothers Gerry and Ross were each holding a hand and they felt him slip away. As the calls were made we grouped together to plan his memorial. I felt extremely privileged to be asked to MC the event and this was something that helped me in the grieving process. It was like a gift to have the attention of all Norm’s friends and to witness the outpouring of sincerity and love and also sadness. Being part of their important day was a way to bond together in community.

The funnier part:

This week we also had an office event to plan for the future of our organization. It involved all of our staff and therefore our colleagues from Newfoundland were in town, and hooboy these folks also know how to party and by party I mean “enjoy a drink”. I started around 5:30pm. At around 12:15am my cell phone rang. It was my lovely wife Heather just wondering where I was. I geelfully let her know how nice it was sitting in a chair in the backyard in the drizzle and eventually she came out to find me fast asleep sitting in a chair getting wet way back near my shed. I would like to pretend I recall exactly how things went but I’m no liar, Heather filled me in today while I laughed sort of sheepishly. She escorted me into the house while I mumbled and tried to dance a little jig on her arm and was poured onto the couch for the night.

In my mind right now I’m telling this story to Norm and I can hear his approving chuckles. He would have truly loved this escapade.