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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
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.
A drop in crime is evidence that the cameras work. An increase in crime is evidence that more cameras are necessary.
You forgot one: "unchanging crime levels mean the cameras kept crime from getting worse, and removing them would mean an explosion of crime." It'd be like firing cops; no politician who wants to keep his or her office would dare do it, even if it a sound decision. The slightest crime, and victims will blame the official, and the press will be more than happy to stick the microphone in front of their face while they do it.
The MBTA (which shockingly reversed its decades-old policy of prohibiting cameras on MBTA property) had been going nuts installing "high resolution digital cameras" around the system. Not anywhere on the platforms, mind you- but at the fare gates.
They blew a lot of smoke to the two competing pulp-journalism freebies (Metro and "Boston Now", which litter the system) about how great the cameras were, how they'd catch anyone jumping fares, etc. Grabauskas bragged about the "high resolution" cameras, and both rags printed images of a guy kicking a gate in (yep. They're that weak- a decent kick will take them out of commission.) The photo was embarassingly bad- you could barely tell it was a guy, and barely ID what he was wearing. The image was low-resolution, blurry, over-compressed, and full of noise.
Oh, and they didn't seem to help when two kids shot up another kid on the Orange line (the MBTA police's response was to transfer the entire trainload of passengers onto busses and hold them for pat-down searches. This was despite witnesses repeatedly stating that the two shooters immediately fled the scene and left the station. They still haven't been found, months later.)
Also, if you're in North Station on the platform for outbound, take a look at the couple of cameras situated at the end of the platform closest to the "Garden". You'll note one is a FLIR camera, pointed into the tunnel. What the hell for?
North Station is also where the MBTA police regularly conduct forced "screenings", usually during rush-hour. For those who don't know: North Station is where people transfer from the orange/green lines to the commuter lines to get home. The MBTA police, like complete idiots, park their vehicles up in front of the station (which is a giant "hey, there's a "random search" thing going on here!" sign), and then stop people trying to get home (where missing a train can mean you don't get home for another 1-2 hours or more.)
Please help metamoderate.
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)
What do you think?
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
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.
"What do you think?"
Is that a rhetorical question?
emt 377 emt 4
The cameras, you see, destroy the socialist impulse, and turn Londoners into the perfect model of predatory capitalists. Which is a great joke, since London has a self-styled socialist mayor.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
You only quoted part of the statement:
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.
I agree with you that the first sentence is meaningless in assessing the effectiveness of the cameras but the second is not. The cameras are supposed to deter crime by making it easier to catch the criminals. If the latter is not the case then they will not act as a deterent. Of course to know this you would want to understand a lot more: does the amount of crime mke it harder to catch the criminals? Is this statistic based on the fraction or absolute rate of crimes solved? etc.
Now, I'll admit that I've only read the summary, but it should be safe to assume that the summary will contain the most important statistics
I agree that it should be safe to assume this but given that the writer of the summary has clearly demonstrated a lack of understanding of relevant statistics it is clearly not a safe assumption in this case!
They're meant as a means to control the populace and nothing more.
Please elaborate.
If by "controlling the populace" you mean increasing adherence to the law, then in effect you are deterring crime. However a camera won't force you to go to church on Sundays or turn you into a philanthropist, or file your tax return on time.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
... 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.
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.
Where I come from in Scotland we have large numbers of cameras, particularly in the city centre where the intention is to reduce crime that is a by-product of drinking. The cameras are part of crowd control and very little else. I worked in a bar in the town centre and I can promise you nobody really took much notice of the cameras. Violence and breaches of the peace were reduced but people continued to consume drugs, misbehave and have sex in doorways. I remember once a guy, on his stag night was stripped butt naked, tied to a lamppost and whipped by his mates and although all of the cameras rotated to watch it, the police didn't arrive until it was all over and they were back in the pub (dressing him in a nappy, I might add for surrealistic effect).
I lived in what was considered the roughest area of the city and at a community council meeting, where some residents were a) demanding camera surveillance and b) drawing comparisons between how they were treated and the how more affluent areas of the city were treated, I suggested that we not only have the cameras but they could pipe it in to all our TV's and we then would could all see who the criminals were. It was roundly applauded, but we never did get the cameras.
Where I live now in South Germany, there are very few cameras apart from traffic control, you can drink for almost 24 hours a day and I have never witnessed street violence on par with my native country. You can drive your car at almost any speed you want on the Autobhan and Germany has the lowest level of Road Traffic Accidents per kilometre in the world - if you are like me tootling along in your truck at a snail's pace of 110 kph and stream of cars pass you with after-burners blazing at + 200 kph, this sounds rather surprising but it is true. If you do speed in the restricted areas and are caught on camera, you can request the photo. The photo is always a full frontal of you in the car with your face clearly visible. Some kids wave and legend has it, they get fined extra for lack of respect. My partner was hilariously caught speeding in a 15kph (!) zone, doing 20 and her employers presented her with the snap.
When I lived in Miami, I couldn't help but be impressed by how quiet the bars were and how friendly the Miami people were - and it's a party town, the bars are pretty wild. Both South Germany and Florida are dynamic economies and trading hubs. Scotland is neither or more accurately, there is less money in the economy. Florida has concealed gun laws and even the poorest South German has a remarkably high standard of living. In Switzerland almost everyone has a gun and for the purposes of civil defence were compelled to have one, and to generalise, they are fairly well off, have almost no crime and no cameras. Now I won't for a moment claim that my observation are anything other than anecdotal, but I also cannot help noticing the paucity of valid evidence either way. So I might dare to suggest that crime fighting cameras have more to do with poor economic performance - which is subject to the market and difficult to affect - and the symbolic effect they have on the electorate - and for that reason we might be looking in the wrong place for the evidence that either supports or demolishes the argument.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
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
Full disclosure: IUTBAPO (I Used To Be a Police Officer) in the UK. Yeah yeah, on Slashdot that's flamebait and I'll never speak of it again, but I have some valid points to make in response to JCR's post.
/. recently about sysadmins delving through employees emails/files/etc. A semi-prevailing opinion was that while yes, we the admins have the access perms to do it, the cold hard truth is that 99.9% of the time people are boring. What makes you think watching a bunch of people wandering aimlessly around their Saturday shopping is any different?
Cameras of the sort used all over the country are run by central control/operations rooms which are manned by civilians employed by the local councils (not cops). They have police radios in the control rooms though so we can speak to them, although they are under no obligation to do as we ask (although in practise, they usually do). There are two points which you may find interesting which I don't think have been mentioned yet:
1) Normally, the cameras record only one frame every few seconds (presumably so as to not max out their storage on account of the vast number of cameras, heh). Operators cycle through and view them as they see fit depending on the time of day, and if it looks like something's going down, either they or the police can request that a particular camera "go to realtime" recording, so as to capture events at normal speed. However if something such as a mugging happens when the cameras are "idle", if it happens very very quickly it is possible that it won't be recorded at all.
2) This is the bit that is in response to the parent -- In the event that we (the police) are investigating an incident, we could submit a CCTV request to the control centre, which is a piece of paperwork containing things such as a location, a short description of what (allegedly) happened, and a time bracket. Operators would then go through the recordings manually to try and find it, and if we were lucky it would have been caught on camera, whereupon they would send us a DVD or (more usually) a VCR tape of the relevant parts of the recording. At no time did we, the police, have direct access to the CCTV system, either in a day-to-day sense or in access to the archives.
I think this is an important point, because it means that the gatekeepers are civilians who are more directly accountable to the elected council representatives, and thus, the people. Of course the usual semi-FUD about cops becoming maniacal power-crazed demons can be half applied to them too, but it makes me think of something I read on