Double whammy

Very clever, British Transport Police.

Not only does your newspaper advert induce total, irrational paranoia (“BABIES and OLD MEN WITH HATS will be EXPLODED into THOUSANDS of SHAMI CHAKRABARTI SHAPED PIECES if we don’t SPY ON EACH OTHER!”).

It also encourages people to be defensive about CCTV cameras. Because as we all know, CCTV is SO incredibly effective. In using electricity.

Come to think of it, what’s that woman in the brown woolen jumper doing? She’s only keeping up the pretence of chatting to the mother sat next to her. She’s actually STUDYING the CCTV camera. STUDYING it! STUDYING IT! Her hands are obscured because she has a NOTE PAD there. Here’s what it probably says (for the avoidance of doubt, she happens to be a Rastafarian jihadist):

10:53am, 26th February 2009. Crummytown high street. Lat: 50.130304004 N Long 4.3384943 E.

In the service of Ja, I have begun investigations of Crummytown High Street. My reconnaissance suggests that optimal hat-wearing-man destructive density may be achieved by placing the explosives next to the broken-down bubblegum machine outside Boots. They may be disguised as a discarded chip-wrapper, stack of Socialist Workers’ Party leaflets or given to a tramp as a sort of ironic present.

Our secondary objective – the slight de-alignment of the childrens’ merry-go-round – would be best achieved by placing an everlasting gobstopper below the rotating mechanism.

It is suggested that we leave the letter of responsibility attached high up a lamp-post, so as to avoid dogs peeing on it.

11:02am

I have just noticed that there is a CCTV camera on the street, which did not come up during my initial scans. Better cancel our plans for world domination. Les from the council, who watches the cameras,  will surely stop our attack.

I must go, the woman I’m ‘talking to’ is starting to think I’m not listening. Also, I just saw her dial.. Shit. ABORT!

Report your swarthy-looking neighbour today! Being a Good Citizen demands it!

(Note: Yes, I do know that some people genuinely do want to cause harm to others in nasty ways which we might describe as ‘terrorism’. It happened in my city already, and Scotland is very well used to dealing with extremists. But it’s also true that people are very bad at assessing risk, and since the risk of terrorism affecting any given person is extremely low, countless orders of magnitude lower than being hit by a car on the street or dying in an air crash, we probably shouldn’t get carried away, particularly when the advice given is completely pie in the sky and counterproductive. Adverts like this BTP one play on our fears to encourage an illiberal, fearful attitude that makes the abuse of state power, and the persecution of ‘others’, much more feasible, whether we start out with those intentions or not. It’s also a total distraction from the real questions we should be addressing as a society.)

–Update:

To give, um… ‘credit’ where it’s due, this campaign seems to have originated at the Metropolitan Police, though the true source is probably Jacqui Smith, working from her underground bunker beneath Harrods. The resemblance in tone to her latest hair-brained scheme is unmistakable.