In the department of magnificent irony I find this post from Alex Massie that begins:

Then again, if things are bad in Ireland, they’re also pretty ghastly here too.

Unfortunately he’s right, and this has nothing to do with fandom. It is all about this article in The Times which begins by noting:

A network of citizen crimewatchers will be given the chance of winning up to £1,000 by monitoring CCTV security cameras over the internet.

I should add that the people behind this idea are aware of the possibility for misuse. The article quotes one of them as saying that:

a ban on players who sent three incorrect alerts, would prevent the game being abused.

But even so I am pretty sure this will end up with lots of money being wasted, lots of people having to be banned, and very few crimes being solved. It is, after all, notoriously difficult to secure convictions on the basis of CCTV evidence.