AS someone who suggested that one way to end prostitution in Waikiki is to simply install a "Hooker Cam" on Kalakaua Avenue and broadcast the zany antics of streetwalkers 24 hours a day on public television, it's hard for me to dump on the police department's growing use of video surveillance cameras. Public won’t dig
video surveillanceYou see, as long as video cameras are being used for worthwhile purposes, like discouraging bad guys from mugging people on the street, I'm all for them. When video cameras are used to catch law-abiding citizens digging their noses or dislodging underwear from body cavities, I'm against them.
And, you know that for every purse-snatching a surveillance camera records, it will record 1,453 nose diggings, 3,280 underwear dislodgings and God-knows-how-many loogie-hawkings.
Nobody admits to being a loogie hawker. Or a nose digger, for that matter. These are extremely private behaviors that perfectly normal people do because they think no one is watching. Of course, some people are better at doing things in secret than others. Men, for instance, believe they are invisible in their cars, even when stopped at traffic lights. That's why you often see a guy's finger go straight up his nose when he hits a red light. Women just don't do that.
The point is that most people do weird things in private and "private" is when they think no one is looking, even if it's in a downtown park at high noon.
The fact is that video cameras already are all over the place, mostly on private property. Just about every elevator has a hidden video camera, a detail I inevitably remember only after I am engaged in a private act like making sure my zipper isn't at half mast or using the reflective part of the elevator door to scan the inside of my nasal passages for any prodigious boogers.
IN the privacy of elevators, men also have been to known to break wind at shockingly grandiose levels. If other people are in the elevator, men merely dispatch the offensive emission sans audio, the hope being that suspicion is fairly distributed among those present. There's nothing worse than being nabbed in a crowded elevator illfragrant delicto.
Society has just about reached the point where we have to assume that we are always being photographed by video cameras. And considering how much supposedly private disgusting behavior is captured on these videos, you have to pity the fool or Big Brother Inc. employee whose job it is to analyze them looking for criminal acts. I'd rather flip burgers in a fast-food joint than have to watch hours of vagrants urinating in bushes.
(Burger flippers, by the way, also are under video surveillance by restaurant managers who want to make sure that employees are not adding any "personal extra ingredients" to sandwiches. Needless to say, I'm all for that type of surveillance.)
But there is a difference between private and public video surveillance. And, there are major questions. Like, who owns public video? Aren't police videos of Waikiki public record?
Shouldn't we be able to scan through the hours of tapes in order to put together our own television shows, like "America's Funniest and Most Amazing Street Walkers"?
Which brings us back to my original suggestion. The fairest way to handle public video surveillance is simply to broadcast the action live on public television. That way, everyone has an equal chance of recording something really important, a criminal in action, a politician or public figure chatting it up with a prostitute or, more importantly, our neighbor relieving a wedgy and then hawking a loogie on the sidewalk.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
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71224.113@compuserve.com.
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