YACK on: Video Surveillance
Grant Sanders
Someone recently came onto YACKon.com and suggested that a good way to keep the streets of Nantucket safe from violence and drug dealers was to install video surveillance Closed Circuit Television

(CCT) cameras all around the island. To take pictures of everyone. Walking. Sitting on park benches. Holding hands. And doing all kinds of things that people do when they think they are not being watched. The theory goes something like this: bad people are everywhere in our little community. We don't know who they are. We don't know when they will commit a crime. So let's videotape everything everyone does and when the bad people do bad things, we've got them.

At first, I was against this

1984-like invasion of personal privacy. But after I thought about it a while, I reconsidered.

They have cameras like this in the United Kingdom. And, sure enough some criminals - the stupid and nonobservant ones who do not realize that the black globes and silvery boxes with lenses on them that follow their every move are actually closed circuit TV cameras - actually do commit crimes on film and are caught and apprehended. The same thing happens in convenience stores across this country. Painfully stupid people attempt to steal $17 in quarters and a carton of Pall Malls and are caught on tape. Later their crimes are broadcast on basic cable for the entertainment of other people who are only slightly smarter than those being recorded.

Of course, Nantucket is a relatively small island, but covering the entire island with cameras would still be a difficult job. And costly. Placing cameras only in places where crime is likely to occur will only drive the criminals to places where there are no cameras in order to engage in their wicked ways.

Perhaps we should get our current crop of kindergarten students busy constructing fake video cameras out of shoe boxes and toilet paper tubes. The we can have the ninth graders (who should be old enough to breathe in a few paint fumes without keeling over) spray-paint them silver and then ask the 11th graders to install them all in telephone poles around the island so that the criminal element will think that there are cameras everywhere and all illegal activity will cease immediately.

(Except among the criminal 11th graders, who will know which cameras are real and which ones are fake. For this reason, I will be introducing a warrant article at the next town meeting to require that all high school juniors and seniors be fitted with radio-monitored ankle bracelets so that the Nantucket Police and the Friends of the Nantucket Public Schools can track the movements of those 106 teens anywhere they go. That should put an end to all criminal activity on the island.)

Or, at least, that is the plan.

Of course, we would still need a few real cameras. Having worked on the Clean Team for three seasons, I have had the pleasure of picking up trash at several of our island's finest beaches. And judging from the large numbers of empty Champagne bottles and discarded women's underpants I have found, I would recommend that we install real cameras, with high-powered German zoom lenses at Nobadeer and Cisco Beaches. The resulting tapes could easily be sold on the Internet under the title "Incredibly drunk rich girls gone wild." The income from video sales as well as the hush money paid by wealthy summer families to edit and destroy specific portions of said videos could ensure that the town of Nantucket never needs to vote to override Proposition 2- 1/2 ever again.

Of course, despite the fact that the Orwellian age has not yet come to Nantucket, the island does have its share of closed circuit video cameras. Several of the businesses on the strip have small cameras that record the evening's events. The banks have cameras. The school, it has been reported, has, or is getting, video surveillance cameras paid for by the Sheriff. And local Internet Web sites have several cameras trained on the harbor, main street, and the bulletin board inside the town building (I wish).

Before Plum TV swallowed up Nantucket Television and started broadcasting the daily tribulations of the rich and the synthetically cheerful, they had a camera pointed up Main Street from a window in the old Pacific Club. It was one of the best-watched shows on the station.

And yet, to the best of my knowledge, none of these cameras has ever picked up images of a crime in progress.

Should that stop us from blanketing the whole island with CCT feeds? Heck no! I think it would be pretty fun to host all of the feeds on YACKon.com so we can all see exactly what our neighbors are doing at all times.

We could see who's not cleaning up after their dogs. Who's trying to push their neighbor's house into the ocean. Who's scratching their butt on the beach. Who's driving clockwise around the Civil War Monument in a Yates Gas Truck. Who's leaving the Chicken Box after hours with her best friend's boyfriend. Who's got an inspection sticker that should have been replaced in January. And who's sitting on a bench on Main Street telling tall tales?

Think of the ad revenues. Think of the ratings. Think of the t-shirt and merchandise tie-ins and bobble head figurines. Think of the blooper videos of people tripping on cobble stones.

I'm putting all of my money into spools of coaxial cable and small CCT cameras. This could be the best thing that has happened to Nantucket since faded red pants.

YACK on. I

Grant Sanders is the Host of YACK, The Nantucket Online Community at www.yackon.com and is aware that the TV camera adds 20 pounds. Logic follows that he must have five or six pointed at him at any give time. His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of The Nantucket Independent. Or his wife.