British Study: CCTV Cameras Don't Deter Crime

British Study: CCTV Cameras Don\'t Deter Crime

The Article

The outcome was pretty predictable.

I hope we don't have to go through all of that here in the States just to make our cars safer. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif

Re: British Study: CCTV Cameras Don\'t Deter Crime

Funny (not really) they needed to spend that much money only to find out what could have been known from the start of this experiment. Hopefully some people in many governments (including my own) will read this more closely than previous studies.

Chrisse

Re: British Study: CCTV Cameras Don\'t Deter Crime

In my brief visit to Singapore, I saw that they had a lot of CCTV cameras, very few visible police, and very low crime. I don't know if they are related circumstances.

Or maybe it's the very quick justice system (compared to US) and serious punishments there. Perhaps Singaporean CPFers would care to comment.

Re: British Study: CCTV Cameras Don\'t Deter Crime

Liek most technologies, it's designed one way but used another way.

If you take two cops off the street in an area and add cameras, you should add two people to the staff manning the cameras. Instead, They add dozens of cameras and only a small staff to observe them.

I would think that nighttime crime would either diminish or at least the crimes woudl be solved quicker. Fewer people on the streets makes it easier to spot folks that are prowling. That may be why parking lot security was enhanced.

Daniel

Re: British Study: CCTV Cameras Don\'t Deter Crime

[ QUOTE ]

...Liek most technologies, it's designed one way but used another way.

If you take two cops off the street in an area and add cameras, you should add two people to the staff manning the cameras. Instead, They add dozens of cameras and only a small staff to observe them.

I would think that nighttime crime would either diminish or at least the crimes woudl be solved quicker. Fewer people on the streets makes it easier to spot folks that are prowling. That may be why parking lot security was enhanced.

[/ QUOTE ]

There have also been charges floating around for the last few years that the CCTV cameras have encouraged selective enforcement of some types of laws. It has been alledged over and over in London that some people, dressed a certain way and committing a crime will draw 'real' LEOs to the scene very quickly, while crimes committed against whole classes of people are never responded to in the same location.

I think that in general the system as set up in London is far to easy to abuse for political purposes, also.

My solution:

Remember back in the 70s when many, many folks in the US used to listen to police scanners for kicks all the time? (I know that people still do, but there have been so many scramblers and such added to those systems that nowhere near as many people listen now as they used to).

Well, As far as I'm concerned they can put up as many CCTV cameras as they want, with just ONE provision -- each CCTV camera put up must have a URL and be available 24/7/365 for anyone to view or save to their own hdd at any time. Of course the police could still monitor it -- no problem.

Many peps would watch. It would not only be good, it would be FAIR. Anyone could call 911 if they say a crime -- just as if they were there on the street. The local police would no longer have a monopoly on this information source that everyone has paid for.

There would be less charges of selective enforcement because of the 911 calls coming in and the fact that everyone would always remember in the back of there minds that anything that happens in front of any of those cameras may be saved to someone's hard drive...anyones hard drive

I'm telling you that this would be better than scanners used to be. All kinds of folks, retired people, shut ins, people bored to death by Survivor. Many people would watch. You just look in the paper and load up four high crime locations on your monitor, 2 X 2.

This would not only greatly reduce certain types of street crime, it would also cut many types of corruption.

Public access to all these video streams would tend to level the playing field in places that are moving towards a total police surveilance state. I know that public access to a CCTV system would also decrease police corruption in my city. I don't mean to sound like I'm coming down on Law Enforcement with this. Just look at it. These systems are just an invitation to police abuse. And hello, they haven't worked in London the way they were set up and administered. That's ~250,000 cameras that haven't worked. They have decreased what is left of privacy in the 21st century, cost a bundle of money and not reduced crime. I don't want us to do that here in the States.

There's no big deal with doing this. I'm only talking about CCTV cameras placed in public locations and paid for by taxpayers.

If public officials don't like the idea, I guess I'd be really interested in hearing them explain why they insist on a monopoly of these video streams of public places if they don't have something to hide.

I can see why the police would want to keep their radio comms secure for many reasons, but to restrict my watching a CCTV feed of a public sidewalk smells very bad. Especially since I must help pay for the sidewalk, the camera AND the salary of someone who claims that they are monitoring it for my own good, but just can't seem to be able to figure out how to use it to reduce crime, which is why it's supposed to be there in the first place.

Thanks for reading.

Re: British Study: CCTV Cameras Don\'t Deter Crime

Great idea, Sub_Umbra. I see one weak point though... DOS attacks on the cameras. This would be the equivalent of a perp cutting the phone lines on a home before breaking and entering. Since the IP addresses of the cameras would be known, they could be attacked, unless the LEOs set up some sort of proxy/firewall system which could throttle the amount of traffic hitting the cameras from the outside, thus guaranteeing them the bandwidth to use it when they needed it. Whaddya think?

Re: British Study: CCTV Cameras Don\'t Deter Crime

PhotonWrangler,

That's a point I hadn't thought of but I don't think it would be to hard to fix, as you said, with firewalls, scripts, etc. The vast majority of the people who commit the types of crimes we're talking about won't amount to much of a threat to the system, IMO. Anyone that could stage a DOS attack to cover up a purse snatching probably wouldn't do the purse snatching anyway. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

What really gets me is that most are so apathetic about this that I see us (in the States) crawling steadily closer to EXACTLY the same type of system in the article. It's like it doesn't matter that it doesn't work -- we're going to end up there, anyway.

There are so many different ways to set up a system like this, I'd just like to see some thought put into doing it in a way that not only works, but also has an inherent structure built into it that makes it harder to abuse by anyone, right from the get-go.

I think that if there is a way to use CCTV to reduce street crime and corruption, a democratization of all of those data streams will have to be a part of it, one way or another. Therin lies the only accountabiliy in a system with such a huge potential for mis-management, bias and abuse.

Re: British Study: CCTV Cameras Don\'t Deter Crime

I personaly do not whant massive CCTV systems regardless or who is watching them, The dangers of abuse outway any gains one may get in the name of safty and sercurity.
Give Me the tools nessesary to alow Me to decide for My self.

I am sadened by the whole knee jerk reaction people seem to have now adays and are quick to give up freedooms and privacy that they will never have agen. The real kicker is no one is any safer, life is dangerus at times, thats just the way it is. The world was not made out of "Nurf"

I know I am going to butcher this quote by a founding father but it was along the lines of " people that trade liberty for securtiy deserve nighther liberty nor security"

Human nature has not changed in 200+ years, what was true then remains true today.

Re: British Study: CCTV Cameras Don\'t Deter Crime

Draco_Americanus,

I agree with you wholeheartedly, and I would like very much to have neighbors like you, but I can't envision this trend turning around. Carve this in stone: We're going to have the cameras. It may not be tomorrow or next month, but we are going to have the cameras.

As much as I feel that we'd all be infinately safer with an armed citizenry, if we don't DEMAND a better system we will end up with a CCTV situation just like London's. Their situation came about because their politicians told them that they would be safer with it. They ate it up. The citizenry will eat it up here, too. Look around. The camerias just keep going up in the States.

My idea is what some might call a holding action.

EDIT

We have a populace whose pop culture is such that they believe that violence is so abhorent that they not only find the use of force repugnant to protect themselves and their own families, but they are hell-bent to farm out all of the legal uses of violence to some kind of government monopoly.

Of course we'll have the cameras -- our politicians have told us that it will make us safer, and we'll all be able to put off the day where we have to take any responsibility for our own safety or that of our families.

Re: British Study: CCTV Cameras Don\'t Deter Crime

I agree that there needs to be public access so long as we're going to have so many CCTV cameras out there funded by the taxpayers.

I get the feeling that they're going to be more about separating the citizens from their wealth (ie, increased fining of people for the most petty of infractions) than a serious crime prevention effort. It's easy to track license plates or even people through facial-recognition software that live above-board than it is to hunt down real criminals that don't have known home addresses.

If these cameras are going to be recognized as some sort of credible evidence, then citizen access is critical for their own defense in a trial or as a certified record of anything else the system might have observed (car accidents, placing a person in a place at a given time, etc).

The way that red light cameras have been implemented in some places is creepy - the company that sold the camera to the local government often gets a percentage of every ticket issued. No potential ethical conflicts there...