Cameras In Public Spaces Meeting II

I'm on the streetcar coming home from the second TPSC cameras meeting. In short, I still have a great deal to learn about this sort of thing. Lesson #1: you can't hold a meeting without an agenda to follow. For most people, this is obvious, but for some reason, it hadn't occurred to me. Those of you who know me know that while I'm passionate and informed, I'm not too skilled at the organisational aspects of this sort of thing. There were a lot of well meaning people in the room looking for leadership and I was less than forthcoming with it. A big thank you goes to Stephen who, having much more experience with organising people, saved the day by bringing everyone back on track.

We now have a position to take to the General Meeting tomorrow. If adopted, a new campaign will be formed and we'll be able to get down to the fun and interesting stuff like deputing at the Police Services Board and fielding media enquiries regarding our reasons our positions.

So what did we come up with? We agreed, that as is defined in our philosophy, the TPSC cannot support the use of cameras as a means to making our public spaces better. We want safe and enjoyable public spaces and given all the research that's been done, cameras are the least effective way of achieving this. Instead, we want to spend that money (this last 3week project cost $2million) on things like public libraries, community centres and most importantly community policing.

As difficult as the meeting was, I'm still very excited at the possibilities. We had a former city councillor from the UK there talking about the abysmal failure of cameras in his part of the world, and there was even someone from the media there, the editor of ReNew Canada, a trade magazine specialising in urban infrastructure. This campaign is going to be exciting and high-profile and I'm thrilled to be a part of it. With the right help, I'm sure we'll do great.