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CANBERRA - In the Queensland city of Ipswich, Big Brother will not only be watching you, he will be talking to you as well.
The city is about to install a series of portable security cameras fitted with loudspeakers allowing operators to warn thugs and hoons that the eagle eye of the law is on them.
"If operators see some kids hanging around and think they might be up to no good they can warn them off, saying, son, I wouldn't do that," Mayor Paul Pisasale told the Brisbane Courier-Mail.
The three-camera system, reportedly eyed also by Britain's Scotland Yard, is being set up at a cost of A$60,000 ($66,000) to add to the much larger coverage of 160 conventional security cameras around the city. The city council says the cameras have reduced crime by 80 per cent in the past five years. But Queensland Police statistics show that Ipswich, 40 minutes by road southwest of Brisbane, remains a troubled town.
In 2006-07 it had Queensland's fifth-highest rate of robberies and ninth-highest rate of assaults, and the sixth-highest overall rate of offences against the person among the state's 29 police districts. It also had the ninth-highest rate of property offences.
Last month the Ipswich News reported that the city's rail station was the least safe in the Greater Brisbane network, with six serious assaults in the previous six months, incidents of thugs spitting and urinating on people, and other drunken and nuisance behaviour.
But Ipswich - home to a raft of sporting greats, as well as one-time Labor Leader and former Governor-General Bill Hayden and Pauline Hanson, former leader of the now-defunct One Nation Party - is fighting back.
The loudspeaker-equipped cameras will be moved to any developing hotspot as complaints come in from residents of vandals, hoons, thieves or thugs.
The cameras will be linked to police computers to accelerate response times.
"This is about trying to take control of our city," Pisasale said. "A small percentage of people are doing the wrong thing. But we are not going to let these morons get to us."
Nor is Pisasale deterred by complaints of intrusion. "This is not about Big Brother spying on law abiding citizens. This is about telling the morons who cause civic damage that they are not welcome in our city."
