Eagle-Eye

Recently, a close mate of mine was attacked in an attempted robbery on a Saturday night. Four guys approached him as he was walking through Adelaide University, followed him through the grounds and assaulted him in the middle of North Terrace. He ended up with a broken leg requiring multiple surgeries, a broken nose requiring surgery, multiple bruises and lacerations and a torn T-Shirt. Shocker of a night. He loved that T-Shirt.

The thing that really pissed me off about this was that none of the guys were ever caught. How is it that a brutal assault such as this one can occur in the middle of North Terrace and the guys can just disappear? Fact – Britain has well over 4 Million CCTV cameras watching the citizens. Adelaide police have access to about 700 in the CBD according to an article in the Advertiser. (I admit the ‘tiser is possibly the worst way to get your news unless you’re still using the message-in-a-bottle system.)

Number of members Port Adelaide will have next year. Number of times Julia Gillard mentions ‘working families’ or ‘moving forward’ in a policy speech. Number of times that bloody mature age student puts his hand up to argue in a lecture. These are all things we accept quite readily make sense when combined with the number 700. Clearly, unless you’re King Leonidis (in which case 700 would be far too many and detract from the glory of your conquest) 700 is not enough.

Now I know this can be a touchy issue, as many people think the government will go all “Big Brother” on them and monitor their every move. I was actually in a tute in my first year of Uni when a bloke complained about this. Obviously he had just read some George Orwell and took it very seriously indeed. What I should have said is; “I’ve got news for you buddy; the government doesn’t give a shit about monitoring you and your art student buddies’ latest rally decrying the impact big business has on your poetry magazine. Now be quiet because the rest of us want to listen to you about as much as we want Christine Nixon as the buildings fire Marshall.” Unfortunately I’m not that quick in real life so I probably just muttered something to lad next to me about how I hated the dude with the filthy beard who wouldn’t shut up. But I digress.

I would happily submit to being watched if it meant dickheads like the ones who attacked my mate could be tracked by camera, or even get some half decent photos of their faces to display somewhere in public. You can’t get better than police on the beat, but Adelaide has an opportunity to shed its ‘backwater’ image and embrace technology to make our city safer.