Blue Iris CCTV Bandaid MIA in Belmont stabbing

The skate park in Belmont is under constant CCTV surveillance, along with several streets in and around Belmont (even extending to adjacent suburbs, Redcliffe, Cloverdale and Rivervale) and it is one of the only areas in Perth to have CCTV purportedly live-streamed into the WA Police Surveillance Unit.

If the big-brother presence in the largely multi-cultural working-class suburb was not troubling enough, more troubling still, is the fact that police are appealing for witnesses to this young man being stabbed ...in front of the 24-7 live-streamed Blue Iris CCTV, and yet the roll-out of CCTV in WA continues indiscriminately and without questioning.


CCTV has caught on in Belmont shire like wildfire. The local council has volunteered the area's streets, resident pensioners' homes, and local businesses, up to the omnipotent CCTV gods for 24-7 surveillance. But, are any of the WA police watching? The police helicopter is fairly attentive over the area, but is reactive and not the preventative measure that Blue Iris was meant to be.

Is it a conflict of interest for the Federal Home Affairs minister to also be responsible for crime prevention funding, where CCTV surveillance(if someone is watching) might lead to the racial vilification of the area's population, largely comprised of migrants, war widows, refugees, Indigenous people and a variety of low income families from minorities?

In late 2009 Brenden O'Connor fleetingly appeared in Rivervale's Needlestick Park to launch the combined approach of CCTV and the older and much more organic Eyes on the Street program in the suburb. Belmont Shire's Eyes on the Street idea involved all council workers and residents spotting people and incidents that they perceived as suspicious and filling out a form for the central police about them, retrospectively - it hasn't taken off in a big way, though. That section of Rivervale(about 6 blocks from the Skate Park) is never terribly short of suspicious occurrences, and maybe the residents/council workers require coaching from Uncle Brendan to identify what police might consider aberrant behaviours, that residents have suffered out for decades.

The Needlestick Park netball courts have now had a temporary fence erected around them but the needle disposal unit remains right next to the kiddies' playground. The parks in the Belmont district are a hub for bored youth and need closer attention. More generally, the shire is long overdue for a funding injection for culturally diverse services and entertainment(as opposed to $ for CCTV cameras) that can give young people a range of supervised and constructive activities at the times of day/night when they will use them. The skate park offers a lot to local youths despite the ever-present bullying there, but there is little else available.

In the AFP Association newsletter "Auspol" last October, CCTV upgrade$ were once again being peddled as a cure-all for the boogie monsters of "organized crime, "terrorism," and "national wellbeing," citing the violent death of one man at Sydney's domestic airport as the catalyst for Australia to transform into a police state. They obviously aren't a cure-all in the South-East region of Perth.

The same story was critical of the media not considering those issues as a first priority in the news, and simultaneously failed to mention the difficulties police have refraining from profiling minorities, aided by CCTV, due to the lack of diversity in their recruitment and promotion practices.

One AIC study of open-street CCTV found that the government tended to make "grandiose" claims about CCTV's potential achievements, where research showed that the results were "ambiguous." The study also said, it was necessary for policy makers "to remain alert to the negative potential of CCTV to discriminate against and exclude individuals who are legitimate users of public areas.