Maybe CCTV is a good idea

New research for the BBC has revealed we have a million fewer CCTV cameras that previously estimated.

Not a huge surprise: if I remember correctly, the previous estimate was based on a count of CCTV cameras of one street in one London borough, around 2002, with the numbers being extrapolated to cover the whole country.

But at 3.2 million, the number is still much higher than other countries.

The BBC notes that

"The borough of Wandsworth has the highest number of CCTV cameras in London, with just under four cameras per 1,000 people. Its total number of cameras - 1,113 - is more than the police departments of Boston [USA], Johannesburg and Dublin City Council combined."

I could, at this point, kick into a rant about how CCTV cameras don't work, how they kill our privacy and they're generally a tool of Big Brother, with Labour's next plan most likely to put them in our bedrooms.

There's some truth in that (not the bedroom thing - I just made that up). But there's more to it.

CCTV doesn't seem to work - yet
As a crime-fighting tool, CCTV doesn't appear to work very well. The evidence shows that areas with lots of CCTV cameras are no better at tackling crime than those with just a few.

But you can't dismiss CCTV on that basis alone. Maybe we just aren't doing it right. As a senior police officer points out, a lot of CCTV cameras have been put in on the basis that merely having them there would at as a deterrent.

CCTV has been very poor as a crime-solving tool. It doesn't tend to produce images that can be used to help solve the vast majority of street crimes, or that prove useful in court to secure a conviction.

That could change. There are a whole bunch of technologies that, whilst slightly scary, could make CCTV more effective. Higher resolution colour pictures, automatic face recognition (pretty rubbish at the moment, but it'll get there).

Plus, the police admit little money was put into what you do with the CCTV images after a crime has happened - that could change.

So, privacy concerns aside, it's possible that CCTV could become a better tool for solving crimes and convicting criminals.

Deterrent effect
Although there's little evidence that CCTV acts as a deterrent, there seems to be a strong belief that it works among the public.

My anecdotal evidence is from discussions raised by local residents in my area. People have told me that, with CCTV cameras installed, youths will be frightened off getting up to no good in the area; and that one shopping centre experienced higher crime than others locally because it had fewer cameras.

The placebo effect
A much-commented-on crime trend over the last 15 years is how, whilst crime has fallen back to 1980 levels (a fall that's been repeated across most western countries), fear of crime has failed to drop as far.

A surprising number of people* believe crime is rising nationally, with slightly fewer believing it's up locally.

It would be easy to dismiss this, but we shouldn't. Our fear of crime can have a massive effect on our lives. The old lady who traps herself in her house, fearing to venture out into her relatively safe neighbourhood. The people who see every young person as a likely thug or hooligan. The family spending hundreds or thousands of pounds they can't really afford on security products they'll problably never need.

Perhaps CCTV cameras, even if useless for spying on people, deterring criminals or solving crimes, might make people feel safer and perhaps that alone would be a good enough reason to have them.

The privacy conundrum
Some of the opposition to CCTV cameras reminds me of the "primitive" peoples who, we were told, believed a camera could capture their soul. People seem to think that merely having your image captured by a CCTV camera attacks our privacy, even if no-one is ever likely to see the images, they're too grainy to recognise and there's no money to do anything with them even if someone did take a look.

But as technology improves and newer systems come online, exactly those features that start making CCTV useful in solving crimes also make it potentially damaging to our privacy.

Imagine having a properly joined-up system with working face recognition. I want to find out if my wife is cheating on me, so I supply a photo and a few hundred quid in a plain envelope and back comes the answer. A tabloid journalist wants to track a celebrity, or that paedophile just released from prison - easy. A crime boss wants to find and kill the grass - no problem.

To CCTV or not?
So here's the really weird thing. The best use of CCTV cameras may be to have lots of them all over the place, make them very visible, but have them not work very well. That way, our privacy is protected and, though crime is unaffected, people may feel safer.

Beyond some anecdotes, I've no evidence to support that. I would need to see a proper study into whether there's a correlation between number of CCTV cameras and low fear of crime before I'd have any confidence it was really true.

Even if that turns out to be true, it would be a brave local council who said "we're not going to upgrade our CCTV network because, if we did, it might actually start working."

There are many other complications we could talk about. In any one location, crime often rises and falls over time. Naturally, you're more likely to put in crime-fighting measures when it rises. As it falls again, whatever you did tends to get the credit. But what if it would have fallen anyway? What if you could have hung a dreamcatcher instead of installing a CCTV camera and crime would still have dropped at the location?

Solid evidence is surprisingly thin on the ground. We've spent hundreds of millions on CCTV and, as more expensive technology comes along, we'll probably spend even more in future.

Perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to find out what works, what doesn't and what the implications are for our society before we decide to continue with CCTV rather than, for example, more bobbies on the beat or better forensics.


* perhaps not so surprising if you read the tabloids on a regular basis.