International Law

Some disturbing news from the UK, where the use of CCTV cameras virtually everywhere have apparently not had much of an effect on crime.

LONDON?In becoming the world’s most-watched nation, Britain was promised a commensurate drop in crime.

But the estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras in the U.K. have made barely a blip on the graph of public safety, a senior London detective in charge of the program admitted yesterday.

Calling Britain’s multibillion-dollar surveillance network “an utter fiasco,” Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said video footage has solved only 3 per cent of crime.

…

Britain’s opposition Liberal Democrats last fall concluded that London’s $400 million system of publicly funded CCTV cameras is virtually useless in crime reduction after the party used the Freedom of Information Act to collate and compare crime data from the City of London and its 32 boroughs.

The study found that the borough of Barnet, with 150 publicly funded cameras, experienced a crime rate almost identical to Hackney’s, with nearly 1,500 cameras. In both boroughs, police solved about one in five reported crimes in 2006-07.

Britain’s Association of Chief Police Officers yesterday defended the long-term potential for CCTV, saying that future technological improvements will eventually place video “equal to DNA and fingerprints” as a crime-detection tool.

I can’t tell from the story exactly what has gone wrong. Neville says the police don’t know how to use the images taken, or know how they are to be used in court. He also says there is “no fear of CCTV” because people don’t think the cameras are working. It is also said that the images are not shared among police jurisdictions enough, and that the images are of such poor quality that they are frequently unusable.

Aside from Big Brother issues, the problems seem to be typical of most of today’s technology: It is ridiculously expensive, doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, and requires constant (even more expensive) upgrading. In other words, I suspect that most of the new surveillance-industrial complex is a boondoggle.

Full post as published by Criminal Review on May 07, 2008 (boomark / email).