Where Big Brother Watches and Talks to You

Middlesbrough, England, Sept. 29, 2006 — -- Britain stands guard with more than 4 million security cameras, or CCTVs, as they call them over here. That's one for every 14 people in the country. The British are among the most-watched people on earth.

And now one town in the north of England has taken CCTV technology a step further.

The monitors in Middlesbrough's CCTV control room show a drunk put back a traffic cone, a vandal replace a strip light he had pulled off the roof of a pizza joint, and a smoker pick up his cigarette butt from the sidewalk.

Why did they correct their infractions? The operator in the control room spotted their actions, and a disembodied voice coming from a speaker attached to a CCTV camera stopped the offenders in their tracks. It seems to work.

I borrowed a bicycle and took a ride down a pedestrian street. Suddenly a slightly tinny voice rang out above me. "Can the gentleman in the brown jacket on the bike please dismount?"

I did, and the voice returned. "Thank you," it said.

The operators are very courteous. But it is shocking to be singled out and reprimanded by a voice that seems to come out of nowhere. People standing around laughed at me. The voice basically shamed me into getting off my bike.

"I don't think that form of public humiliation to get social control is the best form possible," said Clive Norris, a sociology professor at Sheffield University, and one of the country's leading CCTV critics.

But he's in an ivory tower, so to speak, and the self-described "man on the front line" in the fight against anti-social behavior is Ray Mallon, the mayor of Middlesbrough. He's a former cop -- nicknamed "Robocop" during his time on the force.

"I don't speak Italian and I don't speak Urdu," he said cryptically. "But I speak crime reduction fluently, because I've been doing it for a long time."

Mallon has attached speakers to some of the 144 cameras in his town. He calls these "intervention tools."