Strong Majority in Favor of Surveillance Cameras

I'm not terribly surprised by these numbers:

Crime-fighting beats privacy in public places: Americans, by nearly a 3-to-1 margin, support the increased use of surveillance cameras — a measure decried by some civil libertarians, but credited in London with helping to catch a variety of perpetrators since the early 1990s.

Given the chief arguments, pro and con — a way to help solve crimes vs. too much of a government intrusion on privacy — it isn't close: 71 percent of Americans favor the increased use of surveillance cameras, while 25 percent oppose it.

Do you know why so many people support cameras? Mainly because most of us aren't doing anything we're afraid for law enforcement authorities to see, and if cameras help them catch the bad actors and those who would do us harm, bring them on.

Now I'm not a fan of cameras used for traffic enforcement, such as red light cameras or cameras designed to generate speeding tickets. I still believe that law enforcement should be done by people and not machines, and there are too many opportunities for misuse of traffic cameras. However, using cameras as observational tools is not a problem for me.