* Spying On Our Neighbors

When I made a sarcastic post about giving up hope on 'foot and bike' patrols in favor of cameras and robots, I had a commenter ask about my term 'Spicago' a couple of days ago. I hope most of you got it? But rpgf and the Gindirske campaign didn't. Gindirske's Karl Rove-blogger tried to paint the comment as racist. I thought I'd set the record straight. Here's what I was talking about.

I'm talking about the 'big brother' style crime fighting that has taken over our neighborhood. I'm talking the blue light camera's. I'm talking the red light camera's. I'm talking about all the private buildings that sport camera's for knowledge of what's going on around their properties. Buildings like the Harold Rider building, the LAMS buildings and the Morseland building, just to name three.

Funny thing about a few of these so-called security cameras. They aren't just protecting the buildings they've been mounted on. They're now focused on buildings across the street in some cases. While mounting a camera on your own property, say focusing on a un-guarded doorway to your property seems all well and good. But placing a camera on your building, then focusing the lens on another neighbors entranceway, to me, that's called spying.

These people doing this type of spying are the same one's who ridicule me for doing what I do with my camera. Please. Talk about hypocrites.

Anyhow, to settle the nagging question. When I jokingly called Chicago-Spicago, It had nothing to do with race, creed or color. It had everything to do with spying on each other. We have turned into a bunch of spy's, keeping track of what the neighbors are doing. And no-one is any safer.