Lim Tean lambasts parliamentary proposal to double the number of CCTVs

Singapore — Lawyer and opposition leader Lim Tean expressed his outrage on Facebook at a proposal that the number of CCTVs in Singapore be doubled.

“It’s a fallacy that more CCTVs will lead to lesser crimes or more crimes solved!”, he wrote in one of his latest Facebook posts.

He also expresses that he was shocked that not a single Member of Parliament (MP) had questioned Minister for Home Affairs and Law K Shanmugam about the government’s plans to increase the number of police cameras in Singapore from 90,000 to over 200,000 by the year 2030.

Mr Lim considers this to be the “most dangerous proposal” brought up in Parliament earlier this Tuesday (Aug 3).

To alert Singaporeans as to how dangerous this could be, Mr Lim adds that he will be speaking and explaining more about this subject during the next few days.

With regard to the notion that an increase in the number of surveillance cameras will ensure that Singapore can be safer, Mr Lim refutes it once more in his post. He writes that the government should have focused more on the safety of citizens by prohibiting visitors that belong to high-risk Covid-19 countries from travelling to Singapore, calling the aforementioned visitors “a huge public health risk to Singaporeans”.

Mr Lim also wonders if such cameras are meant to monitor places such as KTVs, which have been in the spotlight recently due to the Covid-19 clusters that alarmed the nation.

While some members of the public view the cameras as an invasion of privacy, Mr Shanmugam says that the need for citizens to live in a safe and secure environment takes priority over privacy.

“Conceptually, having cameras in public spaces is no different from the police interviewing eyewitnesses to establish what happened,” he said during the parliamentary motion.

“The camera is a constant, ever-present eyewitness, whose memory won’t be suspect. It’s literally black-and-white evidence.”

You Zi Xuan is an intern at The Independent SG. /TISG