Effectiveness of Surveillance Cameras
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There are some interesting statistics emerging from the United Kingdom - a place which has been called the ‘Surveillance Society’. The longstanding assumption has been that surveillance cameras deter crime. However, this premise is being challenged:
“…A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.”
link: Tens of thousands of CCTV cameras, yet 80% of crime unsolved
It seems that the empirical data are at odds with some of the operating assumptions. The advocates of surveillance cameras have a ready response to these data. And that response is ‘more cameras’.
Catherine Forsythe
Tags: surveillance cameras, security, crime, united kingdom, empirical data
One Comment
tinwheeler
September 26th, 2007
at 12:39pm
Installing cameras around our house has made a marked difference in our neighbors behavior. When I was a boy my father made me lock my bike in our rickety garage. One evening I said “All one has to do is pull out the hinge pins and the door will fall down”, He replied “Well, It keeps the honest ones out!