“Big Brother is watching, but it’s for all the right reasons.” This was the opening line of a College Life Newspaper article published last week in response to Oswego putting up new cameras to try and “thwart” criminal activity in the area. Besides a complete lack of awareness of what Orwell tried to warn us of decades ago, this serves as a chilling reminder of a growing trend across our nation: we are now willing to give up our most valued asset, our privacy, in the name of some kind of vague notion of security.
Everyone should be immediately skeptical of such a claim without concrete goals and supreme oversight by the townspeople. Spectrum Local News interviewed bookstore owner Emil Christmann, who said that he supported the cameras even though he has never had the need for them. He also said that he has “always felt pretty safe downtown,” and “never felt like we really needed surveillance of this type.” This is a problem that has not even affected him.
If the government wants to keep crime down in Oswego and to help businesses in the area feel more comfortable, there are better ways of doing it. It is true that thefts are the leading crime in Oswego, but this is a minute number. Oswego is supremely safe for its size and, as Christmann has said as a lifelong native, locals and outsiders alike feel safe downtown. Oswego is using a $10 million Downtown Revitalization Initiative grant to improve the city and these cameras are cutting into it. This money has been put towards small parks, making the city more walkable and other sorts of reinvigoration for the city, but these cameras are not the way to spend what is left.
Oswego could give breaks to these companies that would be covered by this grant and these businesses, that would otherwise be wrapped up in taxes and other city-based financial stresses, could use the extra money to put cameras on their own businesses if they see that as being necessary to the security of their business. They could also use that extra money to reach out to customers and better serve the community.
As a Republican, Mayor Billy Barlow should be eager to see these kinds of changes that can be made with the right application of government, not outright spending. In the past, Barlow has done good work balancing the budget and has given tax cuts after doing so, but spending money on these cameras that businesses are not even sure if they need is a little strange for a party that stands on fiscal conservatism.
Mayor Barlow seems to think that we need to give “more confidence to downtown property owners,” but this is a poor way of doing so. Oswego needs to diversify its holdings and encourage businesses to crop up across town, not stomp out a nearly non-existent problem that could be solved by giving local businesses the freedom to choose what they need. That being said, these cameras are up and the money has been spent. Now that that choice has been made, Oswegonians should demand oversight and accountability for how this information is used, as well as statistics to prove that this money was not spent in vain.
Photo from Pixabay
