An internal Metropolitan Police report has concluded that, for every 1,000 CCTV cameras in London, fewer than one crime per annum is solved.
Britain is now, by some margin, the most spied-on country in the world. There are over four million cameras deployed in the country, one million of which are in the capital. On my fifteen minute walk to and from Parliament every day, past some of the most sensitive and secure buildings in London, I must be recorded on camera several hundreds of times.
The report confirms what many have felt for some time: that CCTV is a highly intrusive, somewhat inefficient and extremely expensive method of fighting crime. The Met report indicates that the cost of solving each offence detected by the use of CCTV is approximately £20,000.
For anyone concerned with civil liberties, this is highly disturbing. It is hard to see why our every movement should be recorded and open to scrutiny for such a modest payback.
It is surely now time for the use of CCTV to be re-evaluated. Whilst there is some evidence of its usefulness as a crime deterrent in such areas as car parks, the value and ethicality of its routine deployment in many other public areas must be in considerable doubt.
We need an urgent national debate as to whether, for a return on investment of less than .1 per cent, we British are content to be subjected to more intrusive surveillance than the citizens of North Korea.
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I am a great believer in the phrase “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from surveillance”.
I have a big problem with the fact that we pay for CCTV and then when there is a problem in an area covered by CCTV, there is a huge management issue about where the cameras can be trained.
“People should not have their human rights violated” is the call of the do-gooders and human rights people.
What about everyone else’s human rights?.
If there is a problem in an area, I want the CCTV trained on that area without a big song and dance taking place about whether a RIPA form has been completed and authorised. It moves away from the common sense approach, if something wrong is happening we need to see it.
It is time to get a grip but we need to get a grip of lawbreaking.
We would possibly not have a good outcome to a number of high profile cases if CCTV was not involved.
So hands off surveillance and get a grip of form filling beaurocrats.
The logical conclusion of David Curtis’s position is CCTV in everyone’s home, just to make sure we’re all behaving ourselves.
Orwellian, but effective, I suppose.
Of course, some of us, the vast majority of us actually do not break the law or behave in an anti-social manner.
We behave decently, not because we have CCTV trained on us, but because we are for tghe most part, decent people.
The criminality of a tiny proportion of the population does not justify an intrusion into the privacy of us all.
If CCTV produced huge improvements in detection and clear-up rates of really serious crime – not just anti-social behaviour – then its use might be seen as a proportionate sacrifice of our liberties.
But, as David (Jones) has posted, it has no such effect. It is therefore disproportionate and an unjustifiable intrusion into the privacy of law-abiding citizens.
I have always been for the cameras, however, it now seems that they may not be cost effective. has anyone assessed how much we pay for them, and the attendant managing and checking of the recorded movements on 4 million cameras? Is every daily record manually checked? If so, what is the manpower cost? If not, are crimes video recorded, and the offenders not pursued?
It must be time to make an evaluation, and possibly use the apparently huge sum saved in order to train and deploy thousands of extra personel engaged in old fashioned coppering. I wonder how the Civil Liberty faction would react to the notion of hidden bobbies here and there, as in the good old days?
In my days as a policeman, all but thieves and the great unwashed and Civil Liberty cranks approved of our ways.
Mr Banks misses the point dramatically but he has credibility because he is a writer. The subject is important and it is one which is easy to snipe at.
He says that we all behave not because we have CCTV trained on us but because we are decent; I am glad he pointed that one out, I would never have thought of it otherwise.
It is not fair or true to infer that CCTV is ineffective, the cameras locally pick up criminality of all kinds regularly and feed it to the police. Detection of crime is important at all levels not just “really serious” crimes (which are still detected often with the aid of CCTV). The majority of antisocial behaviour is a crime which needs to be stamped on but it is treated as a fact of life by Mr Banks in his reply and by many others also.
The serious part of the argument is that CCTV is important to ordinary people like me because it is one link in a chain of defence against a rising tide of lawlessness.
The downside for me is that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act curtails the effectiveness of the cameras in the name of human rights.
I do not consider CCTV an intrusion on my human rights and neither do the majority of people that I have spoken to about it (probably not a representative sample of the population before Mr Banks says it) .
I make the point again despite Mr Banks’ Orwellian jibe, CCTV is important and effective. Those against CCTV always quote statistics of cost per crime solved which is a figure which involves staffing and infrastructure; it is easy to be negative.
What is the alternative, more police officers on the streets all the time? There is not much chance of that.
Take the gloves of RIPA off, not smother CCTV in beaurocracy and then claim that it is ineffective.
Were some CCTV camera operators not prosecuted for voyeurism in Merseyside when they disabled the privacy settings and zoomed in on people dressing and undressing? Of course if the curtains were closed!!!! Perhaps the current administration will require a webcam to be present on a pc connected to the projected useless 2 meg broadband to give them the ability for GCHQ or the American NSA to hack in and view the webcam for just that purpose. Why not get more paranoid and follow the thoughts of Professor Warwick the Register’s (www.theregister.co.uk) Captain Cyborg who supports the implantation of RFID chips in people to track us like cats and dogs. There is a place for cctv, just not the level of intrusion here. At a local level when there has been a problem, the camera is usually pointing in the direction opposite to the action, so nothing was caught.
David (Curtis), it is possible to disagree with a point of view without missing it, dramatically or otherwise.
I understand that you do not regard the widespread use of CCTV as an invasion of your privacy, but others, myself included, do.
With regard to Orwell, it was not a jibe. If you follow the argument that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear from surveillance, then in the interests of crime prevention, we should all be monitored, our phones tapped, texts monitored etc, etc.
No-one seriously suggests this, because there is generally an acceptance that the sacrifice of privacy should be proportionate to the interests of crime prevention and detection.
None of this is new, these are old arguments that were thoroughly debated when CCTV was first introduced.
What IS new here is, as David blogged, the Metropolitan Police report which says that for every 1,000 cameras, just one crime is solved per year. If police forces turned in those figures – one crime solved per 1,000 officers – they would be disbanded tomorrow.
This I am afraid, is the point you have thus far failed to address. Unless you take the view that woefully inefficient CCTV would be improved by deploying it even more.
I believe the use of CCTV has not produced the crime detection and prevention benefits which justify the intrusion it represents into the privacy of the law-abiding majority.
So, respectfully, I understand your point of view, but I don’t share it.
Quote from David Banks ” the Metropolitan Police report which says that for every 1,000 cameras, just one crime is solved per year. If police forces turned in those figures – one crime solved per 1,000 officers – they would be disbanded tomorrow”
Quote from David Jones “The Met report indicates that the cost of solving each offence detected by the use of CCTV is approximately £20,000″
Of course one cannot argue with those statements in principle but what my point of view is that they are statistics which is produced to prove a point. They are not necessarily facts.
There are so many statistics which are trotted out by all sorts of groups, police forces included, that are not facts.
There are so many statistics taken as fact these days that it is right to question them.
There are also many other issues that impact on crime statistics to drive them down to fit into Government targets.
So why should we believe these particular statistics and what cameras are being counted into the equation? Jewellers in big towns have cameras to look at people wanting to be admitted, are these counted in the argument. The answer is that we don’t know.
In Conwy, which is where I live the CCTV is managed by the Council. They regularly supply information about criminality to the police which may or may not be resourced depending on availability of officers. If it is not resourced at the time it may or may not be reviewed at a later date by a police officer.
If it is reviewed at a later date/ time the information on the tape may not be sufficient to support the 100% CPS evidence standard before they will take a case to court. In such a case the evidence of the tape will not be progressed, even though it may show a known person allegedly committing an offence.
That does not mean that the CCTV is useless, in such a case it is an argument for police to respond to all calls from the CCTV operator. That does not always happen because the CCTV operators do not speak directly to officers they have to speak via Police Control Room who can view CCTV images if necessary. It can be difficult in such cases.
That is why I view the statistic that for every 1000 cameras, one crime is solved per year; there are so many variables.
Until the argument is taken up, it is so easy for the statistic to be taken as true because the police said it.
That is why I confront the call by David Jones for CCTV to be re-evaluated on the basis of the staistic.
If changes to CCTV coverage are to be contemplated then all levels of community should be involved in the debate. Paliament certainly, CCTV operators importantly as well as their managers, police officers, members of the public.
There should not be a presumption that CCTV is failing. Evidence is one thing, statistics are another matter entirely and can be manipulated or quoted out of context.
That is my point and as Mr Banks said, I had not addressed it fully.
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The question has to be asked is why is that figure so low, is because the systems are not being used correctly, are the systems installed correctly, are the cameras up to the job.
It’s easy to say figures are so low for whatever reason, but we need to change how CCTV is used, and we have to loose these human rights laws to protect known offenders, as said above nothing to hide, nothing to fear,
One of the biggest failings for CCTV is response times, you will find many incidents are report during the actual event taking place but the authoritys cannot respond quick enough for whaterever the reason thus by the time some one turns up damage done and offender gone and no time for investigation.
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