big brother

London is the world capital of vigilance from above. There are more CCTV cameras here than in any other city on the planet, with numbers of up to two million floating around the internet. They are usually harmless, hapless even, like when another assault or knife attack is committed and police apologize for having only the grainiest images of the suspect, or when Banksy, still unidentified and certainly unapprehended, puts a funny little tag around one. The cameras have become so much part of the urban fabric that people hardly notice them. They're like rubbish bins, except there are fewer moments when you feel you need one.

Today, Hammersmith & Fulham Council, my local authority, felt such a need. They had captured a guy who, after a night on the town, ran into a bit of a predicament and relieved himself on Shepherds Bush Green. We're talking pants down and ass on the grass. To help identify the guy (and presumably make him clean up his mess, though the infraction happened a week ago and it has rained and snowed since then), the Council is appealing to the public. It has put the surveillance video online.

It's 2:40am, the middle of the night, but the images are crisp and clear. There are not a whole lot of lights on the Green, but the man is clearly recognizable. You don't have to be his mother to see a familiar face. The camera, high-definition and infra-red-equipped, starts tracking a suspect, keeping him in sharp focus as he wanders behind a fence in the distance. The night vision technology is top-notch. When he's in the middle of his act, he's caught. A council worker in the control center in Hammersmith where the footage is streamed in real-time flips a switch and a spotlight comes on, trained on the crouching offender from the same post that holds the camera.

From a technical point of view, the video is amazing, but you will not see it here. You will also not find a link to it, both for the simple reason that I'm outraged and need to keep to the moral high ground while I rant. As much as I'd like to, I can't bitch and moan with a clear conscience if I show what I'm about to condemn.

Let's start with the Council's deeply flawed approach of judgement without trial. We see clearly what's going on but we know nothing of the background. Has the guy a medical problem, a weak sphincter for example? Has he mental-health issues and is thus one of what compassionate politicians like to call "the most vulnerable members of our society"? Maybe he's had one too many wings at one of the grubby chicken shacks along Uxbridge Road. Should he be punished twice for that?

There are automatic toilets near the Green, in front of the former library. If the Council website is up to date, their use is all but 10p. But maybe the guy was out of money after a long night out. Should empty pockets condemn him to have his pants full? In the video, he doesn't look minutes from disaster, rather leisurely walking over to a dark area on the Green before dropping his jeans. It's still possible that he had a long ride home ahead and was just accelerating the inevitable to the benefit of his fellow passengers on the night bus. And even if he is what the honorable citizens of this borough would call an "antisocial element", he still doesn't deserve to be exposed in public like that.

No crime has been committed. It is telling that it's not the police who've put this video online but the council whose business it is to run local services like schools, libraries, swimming pools; collect the rubbish; maintain parks; and keep roads clean and smooth. Now they're starting to run an online pillory. I'm not comfortable seeing my council tax spent on medieval punishment and abuse.

You could say that someone behaving like a dog is asking to be treated like one, but I haven't seen neglectful dog owners officially pilloried, so that's a moot point. You could furthermore argue that it's not that the Council is demeaning the guy but the guy is demeaning himself, and that's a fair point. But to what purpose other than humiliation is the entire video put online? A few screenshots and a short explanation would aid identification just the same. Sadly the Council's response is as repugnant as the behavior that triggered it.

Any of the preceding points should be reason enough not to put the video online, but none of them drove me to write this post. What I find most odious is the extraordinary hypocrisy in this story. This is, after all, the Council that presides over combined sewer overflows every time it rains. This is the local authority that fights tooth-and-nail, with distorted facts, truth-twisting propaganda and pathetic name-calling, the only plan that exists (proposed by Thames Water and rather expensive and disruptive) to solve the problem of inadequate sewers. This is, in other words, the Council that keeps shitting in my river, discharging millions of liters of dilute fecal matter into the Thames in 2012, the wettest year in recorded history. Someone needs to put the spotlight on them.