🌀 Safety Theatre: The Cameras Are Watching (Probably)

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You walk into a shop and notice a black dome camera in the corner. Something shifts, and you feel watched. Maybe you stand slightly straighter. The place seems safer.

But here's what nobody openly admits: there's a good chance no one is actually watching that feed. The dome could be a plastic shell with no lens inside. Or it's real but records to a drive that no one checks. Or it feeds to a call centre where one person monitors forty screens at once.

The camera didn't increase your safety. It merely gave you a sense of safety.

That gap between the performance of protection and actual protection is one of the least examined dynamics in modern life. We are surrounded by safety signals that rely on appearance rather than function. Posters. Checkpoints. Apps. Guards who aren't guarding anything in particular.

This is safety theatre. And it is ancient.

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More than 2,700 years ago, the Assyrian king Sargon II established a new capital at Dur-Sharrukin, present-day Khorsabad in northern Iraq. At each of the seven gates of his palace complex, he installed lamassu: enormous stone statues with the body of a bull, the wings of an eagle, and the bearded head of a human. Each weighed up to 40 tons.

They were not there to fight; they simply stood guard.

The sculptor gave each lamassu five legs, creating a deliberate optical illusion: from the front, the creature appears stationary and grounded; from the side, it seems to stride towards you. You could never catch it at rest.

Cuneiform inscriptions extolled the king's authority and warned of punishment for those with ill intentions. The lamassu did not fight invaders. Instead, they conveyed that fighting was an option. Their role was to showcase the state's protective power, not to wield it.

They are the world's earliest safety signs.

The Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han spent years examining what occurs when visibility becomes our primary signal for trust. In The Transparency Society. Han argues that making everything visible doesn't create safety; it fosters the feeling of control. The drive to gather more information doesn't generate more knowledge. It creates the illusion of containment.

Safety theatre relies on this very logic. The camera, the guard, the sign… your brain perceives them and registers: something is being done. The threat is managed.

Security expert Bruce Schneier highlighted this division in his 2008 essay "The Psychology of Security": "Security is both a feeling and a reality. And they're not the same."

The feeling is processed by ancient brain systems that evolved to respond to visible threats and calm down when they detect visible responses to threats, whether or not those responses are effective. Your rational mind can know the camera is probably fake. The older part has already relaxed.

Safety theatre exploits this gap: it performs protection for the emotional brain while leaving the harder question mostly unanswered.

Amazon's Ring now boasts over 10 million users on its companion Neighbours app. The product offering is straightforward: a digital neighbourhood watch. Real-time alerts. Footage sharing. Community protection.

What does the evidence indicate? Criminologist Ben Stickle, of Middle Tennessee State University, told Scientific American in 2022 that Ring claims its cameras prevent crime, but "it's really not been studied." A 40-year systematic review of CCTV published by the Office of Justice Programmes found that actively monitored cameras showed meaningful reductions in crime, whereas passively monitored ones did not. The cameras that work are the ones someone is actually watching. Most aren't.

Meanwhile, journalist Lauren Smiley's reporting for Wired revealed that the Neighbours app functions less as a safety tool and more as a social feed driven entirely by fear. Users scroll through alerts, which encourage vigilance but do not provide real safety.

The modern lamassu is a $12 black dome. It doesn't need to function; it only needs to appear as if it might.

📜 Quote: "Security is both a feeling and a reality. And they're not the same." — Bruce Schneier, "The Psychology of Security," 2008

📊 Study: A 40-year systematic review of CCTV surveillance by Welsh & Farrington (Office of Justice Programs) found that active monitoring significantly reduces crime. Passive monitoring cameras that record but are not watched have almost no effect. Security is only effective when it is actively maintained.

🎨 Artifact: The fake security camera. Available on Amazon for about $10–$15, it is a dome shell with a blinking red LED and no lens. Stores and homeowners install them because they resemble real cameras. It is the purest form of safety theatre: all signal, no function.

😂 Meme: The "Caution: Wet Floor" sign placed on a puddle that never gets mopped. The danger is real. The sign addresses the sign-placer's legal liability. The floor is still wet.

🤔 Prompt: Choose one safety measure in your daily life: a lock, a camera, an app, or a work policy. Does it genuinely make you safer, or does it mainly give you a feeling of being watched? What would true safety look like in that context?

What's your most theatrical safety measure? The ID check verifies nothing. The bag search where nobody looks. The compliance training everyone forgets…

Safety theatre isn't always cynical. Sometimes it genuinely aims to address fear, and fear is real even when the threat isn't. Schneier himself has observed that security theatre can have value: it reassures people, and reassured individuals sometimes behave more safely.

But when we confuse performance with protection, we stop asking tougher questions. We buy the camera instead of improving the lighting. We manage the feeling of the problem rather than the problem itself.

Next time you feel safer somewhere, pause. Is the threat truly gone? Or has someone merely put up a convincing sign on it?

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