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One Crime Solved Per 1,000 London CCTV Cameras
SpuriousLogic writes "Only one crime was solved for each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city's surveillance network has claimed. The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals. In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers. David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: 'It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent.' He added: 'CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness. It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security. The Metropolitan Police has been extraordinarily slow to act to deal with the ineffectiveness of CCTV.'"
A lot less now that criminals know they have a 1 in 1000 chance of getting caught.
I think a mod point would have been wasted here as your comment already seems buried.
It's exactly what I was going to say. I know of plenty of local businesses that get ripped off and surveillance pics are usually worthless.
Fake cams are almost as good as real ones.
Criminals know how to defeat simple measures, it's what they do. So I would say that probably 1-2% of criminals would be completely deterred from robbing somebody, stealing a car, or whatever, but the rest would just scout out the cameras and not look at them and wear a hoodie to prevent good angle/shot of the face, or simply wear other methods of obscuring their faces.
I'd need to see actual data. Seems equally likely to me that only 1-2% of car thieves are smart enough to do avoid these measures. If you're running low on meth and see an ipod in a car at night, you may be thinking little more than smashed window = ipod = more meth, "wear a hoodie so you don't get photographed and caught" might be pretty advanced for you. After all, everyone knows the halfway intelligent criminals don't steal cars, they go to law school.
Bill the copper is meant to be an approachable person of the community that everyone knows. You may or may not realize this, but in some countries the Police are still looked at as very strong role models. As someone going into law enforcement(Canadian), I feel kinda ashamed that the UK has gone this far(Yes police reflect on the actions of other police a lot. Don't think they don't), and the police aren't looked as someone you can feel safe around but as someone to fear.
Regardless of this, going from organic to electronic is huge. Not only is there no "person", when you need a person that nearest dispatch may be 10-45mins away. Tell that to some women that's just been raped. GOOD JOB! I hate CCTV and everything it stands for, I realize the original intention and it was sound. It's currently bad, it will remain bad. Want to ensure crimes get solved, ensure public trust, and ensure that you don't seem like you're out of touch with people?
Hire good cops that have empathy, understand the public, and understand they're not there for the quick fix to a problem. But that a problem, may require a long haul, and that as a cop. Your job is to fix them.
Om, nomnomnom...
The privacy issues are actually trivial to solve: make the cameras automatically encrypt data before shipping them in protected form to an archive. No one sees the direct feed, no one is able to access that data. In order to access data, a judge has to issue an order (if the system is well designed, that should be possible to do in a few hours at most), and the order allows a group of isolated people with specific instruction as to what to look for, to view in a closed room the unencrypted feed. Then, once those have made the observations and passed them to law enforcement, the unencrypted feed is discarded. Whenever the feed has to be used in court, it can be unencrypted permanently with a proper judicial order, for the time span that is relevant. The chances that you are doing something you would like not to be disclosed in the same camera and at the same time a crime is being comitted is low enough to make it a non issue compared to the benefits. The problem is that this is not being done. Recordings are being done unencrypted, ans monitored in real time by people that could be re recording for whatever purposes they have. That's unacceptable especially compared to the limited benefits.
Am I the only one who realizes that these massive CCTV surveillance grids have nothing to do with stopping crime?
I live in Baltimore, trust me, cameras don't help. This city keeps getting more violent, dangerous, and crime-ridden every year. Any decrease in numbers you see is simply corrupt policy that selectively reports crimes, failing to do so entirely if they think they can get away with it.
Way to go SpuriousLogic. You take today's top prize for selectively snipping text from a news article to spin a point you want to push. This was actually an article about how ineffective the current use of CCTV image data has been, with an emotive tag line to snag the eyeballs. The article concludes by saying:
Quite different from the spin on this slashdot story huh. But then you knew that didn't you, and you knew the much of the Slashdot crowd would just lap it up.