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: Grits for Breakfast

Surveillance cameras and crime

Having written before about longitudinal research showing that, except for a handful of specific circumstances (like car parks), surveillance cameras don't reduce crime, I was interested to see a study described by the blog Judgement Day about camera use in Philadelphia, where researchers claimed cameras reduced crime in target areas by 13%.That's a pretty startling claim of success that flies in the face of meta-research on the topic.Examining the study itself (pdf) more closely, the topline summary of a 13% reduction based on the cameras looks pretty overstated. When you get down to the bottom line (see the chart at the bottom of page 11), researchers found crime did not go down overall at half the sites.Researchers divided 18 cameras into 8 different sites because several were placed close to one another...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on May 15, 2008 (boomark / email).