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10,000 Cameras Ineffective At Deterring Crime
Mike writes "London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million but an analysis of the publicly funded spy network has cast serious doubt on its ability to help solve crime. In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average. The study found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any. Could this be an effective argument against the proliferation of cameras or will politicians simply ignore the facts and press ahead?"
Politicians will simply ignore the facts and press ahead.
is the first comment by RandomVisitor on the story at Bruce Schneier's blog. It's really quite true; we can't judge based on these statistics whether it's working or not.
A drop in crime is evidence that the cameras work.
An increase in crime is evidence that more cameras are necessary.
Once you start arguing effectiveness then all it takes is a new study to show that it's still promising technology and that it just needs to be continued/improved/advanced/made more comprehensive/etc.
Dont fall into the trap of arguing the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of something that we already know has nothing to do with crime.
The study (or at least what was published in this article) says nothing about the rate of crimes solved before the cameras. The study doesn't talk about other issues like police force funding Nothing about the demographics of each borough. So while it may be true that cameras don't stop crime or help to solve it, there is nothing in this article to support that assertion.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
They just need a better system. Right now, they're running the video through a 'youtube' filter, so the video's downsampled and compressed to hell, so everyone looks like Elmer Fudd. But, the system is backwards compatible to work with Windows 95!
And they also need speakers, so when they view the live video, and they see someone commit a crime, like say, jaywalking, they can order the offender to stop and wait for a bobby to come and arrest them. Or, if they look trustworthy, to walk to the nearest police station and turn themselves in.
Of course, this is meant to be funny, but if a politician reads it, they might think it's insightful [unfortunately]...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The study found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.
on another hand, if I want to do crime, I wouldn't want to do it in place that has hundreds of cameras.
If the cameras help reducing crime rate, then they work.
The point of these cameras is not to make people safer, but to make people *feel* safer. Last I heard, the Brits love the things ...
The cameras are not there to catch criminals, but to deter them. Those who would otherwise be committing crimes in full catchable view of the cameras are no longer doing so.
Don't get me wrong, I like my privacy as much as the next /.er but accuracy is important.
Tomorrow, I may eat another house plant
Yes that's how science works.
Hypothesise at random, spend a wad or two on well-connected suppliers and contractors, in the absence of empirical validation of the utility or necessity.
Then declare on failure to achieve any result at all that one has now acquired a valid data point.
Hmmm.... Better try this again, with a different type of camera! Then - at worst - we'll have eliminated two possibilites, at the bargain cost of 400 Million!
GET THIS THROUGH YOUR HEAD! Crime is the excuse used to end dissent. If there were political protest of any size, you can bet the participants would have all been ID'd and added to the "terror" database.
V for Vendetta.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Don't confuse the politicians with facts, they have demagoguery to accomplish.
Seriously, when did "facts" actually figure into politics. Everything is emotion. "Its for the children", "War on _______", "help the homeless" etc are all emotional stimuli.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Exactly. The only people who have anything to worry about from the cameras are the "law abiding" people who do not support the current government and are willing to be seen protesting.
Given the assumption that not all cops are bad, and going further saying that most cops are good, the solution to the crime problem is to get police back on foot in communities.
You can only stop so much crime blowing through an arterial road at 45mph. But regularly patrolling an area on foot, a good cop will notice that "Mrs. Allison's car is gone, and the front door is wide open" prompting a closer look.
Also, foot patrol (or bicycle, rollerblade, whatever) cops aren't generally tied up with traffic stops and other non-criminal events. They are free to stop the little crimes (graffiti, vandalism, burglary) that scare off the 'good' folks allowing seedier elements to take over an area.
But, cops on foot are expensive. And you need a lot of them to be effective. And since they're going after criminals, they're not making the city any money in the form of tickets and fines.
There are some jobs best done by real humans on location. Maybe your board meeting with the Beijing office can be done via teleconference, but protecting residents and preventing crime cannot.
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10,000 Cameras Ineffective At Deterring Crime
... that criminals are incapable of changing their tactics/habits, and that having cameras simply makes it impossible for them to work. That's just not true: criminals will adapt to changing circumstances and will find new ways to achieve their nefarious ends. Cameras merely change the face of crime, they don't eliminate it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I wonder how much of this has to do with the misconception that somebody can use Photoshop to extract a high resolution image from a crappy CCD cam.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Politicians will simply ignore the facts and press ahead.
Many around here misrepresent and ignore facts as well. That and they have emotional poorly thought out reactions that are rooted more in their politics than it logic. Note the statement:
"The study found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any."
If you apply a modest amount of logic it might occur to you that everything seems to be described in terms of percentages. The fact the percentages may be similar does not mean cameras are ineffective. What is the volume of crime? The absence of such info should make an unbiased reader quite suspicious. Also what were the volumes before the cameras? One of the stated goals of the camera systems is that they would be a deterrent. The volume of crime could be a fraction of pre-camera days and the percentage of solved crimes could be the same.
If you search BBC for CCTV, what you find is nothing favorable. Law enforcement figures consistently say the money would be better spent on normal police work. Studdies never show a real decrease in crime. Demographics don't matter because the cameras are everywhere.
The only reasonable conclusion is that the cameras are not really about crime.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
... the people simply ignore the facts, and politicians cash in on their fears about crime on the streets.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Did any politician ever admit they were wrong ans say "Ok, let's scrap it?"
Nope. It's always a case of "I didn't have enough funding to do it properly!"
Seriously, how hard is it to beat a camera. A hoodie, a baseball cap and sunglasses - it's not like they're high definition video...
(And no, I'm not advocating they spend another 200 million switching to hi-def - see above.
No sig today...
There are two ways to use CCTV cameras, one is simply having them there as a deterent to try and scare would be offenders, the other is to catch someone in the act and identify them. Now, the second strategy is complicated by the fact that in a public place almost all your footage is going to be out of focus. A camera has to be set to a specific focal length which can cover a specific distance from the camera and anything closer. If you set the length too far away, you get a horribly small field of view. So, given that you might have 3-4 cameras covering a block thats maybe 10,000 square feet, and perhaps 100 square feet of that is actually clear on camera, the odds of catching a crime clearly enough to identify an offender would be minimal. Therefore if their strategy is simply as a deterent, then we have one conclusion: the criminals in this area don't care if they're being watched, and you just wasted an obscene amount of money.
The US currently spends over $50B per year on the war on drugs. They have been "fighting" this war for over 30 years and have not even made a dent. So, every year, they spend more. If this isn't the clearest example of politicians ignoring facts then I don't know what is.
People who say "money does not buy happiness" are just people without money trying to make themselves feel better.
> Could this be an effective argument against the
> proliferation of cameras or will politicians simply
> ignore the facts and press ahead?
It has been shown by traffic engineers that American
speed limits are set too low. The rule they use is
the 85% rule - the average speed of 85% of the traffic
is the best speed. By definition, in fact, as it there-
fore guarantees that cops only have to deal with the 15%
of the population who will not drive reasonably and
prudently. This rule-of-thumb has been shown useful
again and again. Yet the US persists in restricting
speeds to 55 or 65 miles an hour. According to many
traffic engineer studies, this results in 75%(+/- a
small number, I don't recall) offenders, far more than
police can handle. Have the speed limits been raised
to recommended levels? They have not. 75% offender
rates are great for bringing in the fines. And
those tickets also mean insurance companies can raise
your rates, even though they know perfectly well a moving
violation has no effect on your probability of a
claim. So, why the obstinacy? Could it be because every
municipality in the country is trying to get photocops
installed everywhere? Do they reduce accidents? No.
But they are great for revenue - as long as you get rid
of that "punishing the transgresser" nonsense and just
assume the registered owner of the violating car is guilty.
Guilty until proven innocent is so much more efficient.
Especially when there is no amount of proof that will
satisfy a traffic court judge that anyone is innocent.
And then we have red-light cameras. Again, traffic
engineers have pointed out - many times - that
extending the yellow light to 4 seconds and making it
consistent for all traffic lights does, indeed,
make red-light intersections safer. So do we do that?
We do not. Rather, we put up a red light camera, and
then we shorten the yellows to push up the take.
And does this make intersections safer? No, in fact the
accident rate doubles, and in some instances triples,
almost all of them, predictably, rear-end collisions.
And, I hardly dare to point out, this, again, requires
eliminating "innocent until proven guilty" and making
the registered owner responsible.
Oh, sure, the registered owner can finger the real culprit
- who is most often their spouse, but hey, it's a tort law,
so it's okay to stress and strain a marriage for the sake
of that fine.
So they all ride the gravy train, and we all pay. We pay
in money for fines and insurance rate increases, we pay in
time, as if commute distances aren't already ridiculous.
We pay in aggravation, which either damages relations with
other people or which will corrode your arteries faster than
any amount of Ben and Jerry's best. And, finally, we pay
with our lives because all of this is very profitable
for the gov't, but it causes accidents, lots of them, and
people get badly hurt or killed in such accidents -
entirely preventable accidents - every day. Think of that
when you pass one of those crosses set up by the side of the
road, and remember that money was more important to the gov't
than the life of that person, someone's son, daughter, spouse,
sibling, friend. The $$$ are more important.
So will we wind up in George Orwell's nightmare here? With
the current mania for gov't spying on Americans I'd say it's
all but guaranteed. But if there is a way to use the system
to catch jaywalkers, parking violations, right-of-way rules,
inattentive wandering between lanes while sipping one's latte,
well, you can bet we'll see those cameras - everywhere.
Freedom. Liberty. Rights. None of these can stand up to
paranoia or the almighty dollar.
Bullshit. This case was solved relatively quickly. There were 38 witnesses. They were all called to the stand and vilified in the press as the "Liverpool 38". The police simply reached for the video first, for probably the same reason men prefer to use GPS rather than ask for directions.
I wonder what's up with those two brats. The were released six years ago and should be 24 by now. As Francis Urquhart might say, surely we can forgive a man a few youthful indiscretions...?
Better image quality is needed, not a greater physical count of cameras. If you can see a face, clothing detail, nipples through wet, white shirts, all the better. Analog CCTV has poor resolution. There will come a day.
Forward to 2000 or thereabouts, and the police are remote figures in flak jackets, almost always inside cars. They are not part of the community, and most teenagers don't identify with them at all. The Government wants to reintroduce the village policeman, under the name of "Community support officers". And who opposes it? The police. The truth is, too much exposure to US TV programs (yes, a study in Manchester showed that some police there were consciously emulating "police" in cop shows) has poisoned their own perception of their role, and many of them are afraid that community police will be too successful.
Where I live, which is effectively a village on the edge of a small town, we now have these PCSOs. Many evenings I see them out talking to the kids on the street, just talking to them, like our village policemnan used to talk to us in the 1960s. The wheel is coming a bit full circle, and it's about time it did. Cameras are useless without the desire of the community to support its rule enforcers.
However, one big factor has changed. Our village policeman did not have to deal with large numbers of drunks about from 11p.m. to 4a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. He occasionally had to put a drunk in the cell, but that was about it. Community policing does not work in the UK's disgusting and horrible drunk culture because reasonable people cannot deal with aggressive, knife wielding drunks.(I'm allowed to say this; it's the most shameful thing about this country.) This is the root cause of the cameras. If we fixed the drunk problem, there would be no need for security cameras. This is one case where the US has mostly got it right and we have got it wrong, and I would vote unthinkingly for the first politician who was willing to bring in the laws that apply in Utah, or even Manhattan.
Pining for the fjords
Just remember that to prevent the 7/7 bombing, they would have to focus on mundane looking people using the public transportation during rush hour. Now tell me how you can do that exactly.
A surveillance society is not about helping to catch criminals. It is all about making the populace terrified to do anything that might offend the powers-in-charge.
... but, dang it, the tin-foil hat wearing libertarians have it right.
Typically they are "sold" to the public under the guise of fighting crime, as nobody wants to stand in the way of a murderer being subjected to justice of the people.
The real reason though is that government's largest risk of being put out of power is not criminals or foreign enemies, but their own people. By making the people feel their every move is cataloged and noted by the government, they are (by and large) made afraid to do anything their government may see as problematic, reducing government's risk of the people demonstrating, peacefully or not.
The cameras were never about fighting crime, they are there both as a panacea for the people and more importantly, a means of control.
I may sound like a tin-foil hat wearing libertarian here
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
Legalize drugs and they are out of business overnight.