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Professor Norman Fenton is a professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University of London.
I want to clarify a couple of things that Norman said there. First off, Klaus Schwab is the founder of the World Economic Forum, this is basically an annual event where the captains of politics and business get together to hobnob. This organisation is the centrepiece of a whole slew of the craziest conspiracy theories, I’m not going to go into them here, but the core claim that Norman made was that Schwab and the WEF are making decisions that he doesn’t like.
This is nonsense. The WEF has no legislative function, and no executive function other than to manage its own event. It doesn’t have the power to decide anything much bigger than what’s on the menu for their shindig. Now, I’m sure that Schwab is a pretty influential person, given who he probably has saved in his phone contacts, but that means soft power, access to decision makers, the ability to persuade them. Neither he nor the WEF have any authority over them.
It’s certainly true that politicians meet at the WEF, it’s probably also true that to some degree they make plans there to coordinate their policies, but what Norman is claiming, that the WEF as a body is making legally binding decisions is just nonsense. It’s the equivalent of claiming that the manager of the Inchydoney Island Hotel is in control of Ireland, because political parties often have their think-ins there.
Earlier, Norman claimed that the ONS confirms that people being vaccinated makes them more susceptible to Covid. The Office for National Statistics, the ONS is the official government statistics office in the UK. It’s a really good service, it was made independent for the specific reason of not having politicians pressuring it to come up with convenient statistics, and is generally well-regarded.
I contacted the ONS about that claim, and although they don’t quantify it, they said that their latest figures available indicate vaccinated people are, in fact, less likely to test positive for coronavirus, but they emphasise that there can be confounding factors, such as people who refuse the vaccine also refusing to wear masks.
I also found a study from Imperial College London that indicated that vaccinated people are three times less likely to get infected. I have emailed Norman asking him for a source for his claim, but he hasn’t responded yet. **Update** Norman has now kindly sent me some links for this, I will analyse them and report shortly.
But even if what he was saying was true, and he can’t seem to back it up, and there is a lot of evidence to the contrary, this dodges the point that the purpose of the vaccine isn’t ultimately to prevent people getting infected, it is to prevent people from dying and getting seriously ill, and as even he seemed to admit, there is an avalanche of evidence that the overwhelming number of people dying or in ICU with Covid come from the minority of the population who are unvaccinated.
At times in the interview, Norman seemed to accept that point, at other times he scoffed at believing any evidence that ‘they’ tell us, whoever ‘they’ are at any given point. And to me, that’s the core of the problem with his worldview. It is the clearest litmus test for an irrational conspiracy theorist. That is, there is no set of circumstances, no possible finding that can refute their theory. If a government body like the ONS produces data which seems to back up his belief, then there you go, even ‘they’ have to admit it.
And when ‘they’ produce data that refutes the conspiracy theory, that’s proof too, see, even they’re in on it, that just shows how big the conspiracy is, it goes right to the top… man. And this guy is a professor of mathematics.
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The AGSI is the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors. It’s basically the trade union for more senior gardaí. You mostly hear from them when they are on the news explaining that yes, gardaí should get more powers and of course, nobody is needed to have any oversight on what they do with those powers.
The ICCL is the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. They are a group, mostly of nerdy lawyers, who dedicate themselves to the often-thankless task of campaigning for civil rights and for checks and balances on the powers of government.
So, when you see a story where the AGSI is pitted against the ICCL, as they often are, you wouldn’t normally have much difficulty guessing which side I would be likely to come down on.
But I saw a story this week that bucks that trend. The AGSI, who hare having their annual conference, have issued a call for the widespread use of bodycams by gardaí. To be fair to the AGSI, they have maintained their form with a whole slew of demands for regressive measures, and attacking any semblance of accountability for gardaí, but this one policy, about bodycams, is interesting.
All the more interesting is that it is opposed by the ICCL. To be fair to the ICCL, they do argue their case very cogently, making points about how they invade privacy, they record the public, but not the gardaí who wear them, and contrary to garda claims, there seems to be no evidence that they improve criminal justice outcomes.
But taking all that into account, I think that, with certain provisos, the case for garda bodycams is strong. With certain provisos, I’ll get back to that. In particular, looking at the ICCL argument that they could reduce trust in policing, I think it’s fair to comment that the people who end up in disputes with gardaí in the circumstances where bodycam video is relevant, those people already have a pretty low level of trust in gardaí in the first place.
That low level of trust could well be justified. Firstly, we know that the AGSI and other garda organisations fight like cats and dogs against any degree of accountability – anyone trying to hide their behaviour that badly knows that they have something to hide. There have been notable cases where garda evidence has seemed very unreliable, as well as incidents, notably at the Shell to Sea protests where gardaí confiscated or smashed the cameras of civilians videoing confrontations, and on the occasions that they returned the equipment, all the recordings were thoroughly wiped. Again, anyone doing that clearly has something to hide.
I’ve mentioned on this podcast before the case of the journalist Dara Quigley, who was filmed by garda cameras, suffering from mental illness, naked and in distress in a Dublin street. Gardaí called up the footage on the screen at the control centre, videoed that screen on their phones and shared the video with thousands of people via WhatsApp. Dara Quigley died by suicide days later.
Which all brings me to the provisos. Depending on the model and settings of bodycams, they can be switched on and off at the discretion of the officer wearing it. If you want to engender trust, that’s not the way to do it.
One option would be, if the technology is up to it, to have the camera recording all the time. If that isn’t possible, then it should automatically switch on if the wearer is moving vigorously; and when the off button is pressed, it should keep on recording for a randomised number of minutes.
The video should be automatically uploaded via mobile networks in real time to a secure server, with access granted only when senior gardaí provide a written request; and the system should obviously be password-protected and record the credential of whoever accesses the video.
I don’t know if the AGSI would welcome those safeguards, but if they were implemented, I don’t think that the concerns about privacy and other problems would go away, but I do think that they would be outweighed by the advantage of having verifiable evidence, and the improvement in behaviour that would bring.
