London's panopticon of CCTVs aren't solving crimes
London has spent £200 million installing 10,000 CCTV cameras, and yet the proportion of crimes solved is going down, not up -- and some boroughs with the more cameras have the worse crime-solving rates.
• There are now 10,524 CCTV cameras in 32 London boroughs funded with Home Office grants totalling about £200million.Link (via /.)• Hackney has the most cameras - 1,484 - and has a better-than-average clearup rate of 22.2 per cent.
• Wandsworth has 993 cameras, Tower Hamlets, 824, Greenwich, 747 and Lewisham 730, but police in all four boroughs fail to reach the average 21 per cent crime clear-up rate for London.
• By contrast, boroughs such as Kensington and Chelsea, Sutton and Waltham Forest have fewer than 100 cameras each yet they still have clear-up rates of around 20 per cent.
• Police in Sutton have one of the highest clear-ups with 25 per cent.
• Brent police have the highest clear-up rate, with 25.9 per cent of crimes solved in 2006-07, even though the borough has only 164 cameras. cameras.
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What is crazy about this is that some MP will use this as an argument for more surveillance.
I don't suppose we could expect to hear the *other* significant statistic: whether the CRIME RATE has gone up or down? It may well be that the cameras have had a deterrent effect, and that crime has fallen. Would that be too much to ask, or should we just presume that the story is biased?
Cameras don't prevent crime, feet on the beat prevent crime. Just like airforce firepower only wins the battle, but it takes well trained and plentiful infantry to win the war. If you do not maintain local presence, the average criminal knows he'll be long gone by the time your central command can actually deploy anyone and doesn't think long term enough to worry about getting eventually caught. So, cameras are just a silly waste of time and money.
If you really think that more cops on the beat can prevent crime then you have absolutely no idea how the police operate.
Bricology is absolutely right. Solving crime is only one metric.
It's quite possible that the cameras act as a deterrent to the most obvious crimes, or the ones committed by stupid criminals.
If the overall crime rate has gone down, the remaining crimes may be ones that are harder to solve.
Make every CCTV a webcam. Why should they get all the fun?
It is meaningless to quote these figures without indicating how wealthy and how affected by crime these London boroughs are.
I don't expect a high crime-solving rate in a poor and/or violent neighbourhood, nor do I expect a high density of CCTV cameras in a rich or calm one.
In other words : these figures alone should not be used to manage the CCTV program, but they can be used in a partial way for whatever agenda you might have.
It also doesn't indicate how many of these cameras have recorded incidents which the police then haven't been able to get the footage of. From talking to my friends in the police, it seems rather infuriatingly common that when they see that a camera's covered the area a particular crime was committed in, they find that it either wasn't recording, or has already recorded over the footage, or there's a big leafy tree in the way - and by the time they've got hold of the necessary video (if it does exist) and had it converted to a format they can actually play, weeks may have gone past.
A friend of mine has already had to bail a suspect for two weeks to get CCTV evidence. This, clearly, is not the way to effectively use the cameras and in some ways they might as well not be there (and some are of such poor quality that they really have no point at all).
That said, they are sometimes extremely helpful sources of evidence.
Cameras dont solve crimes, they only record them occuring. Police solve crimes, and perhaps if they spent less money on high tech toys and more money putting more police on the street and give them (some) more powers to prevent certain crimes then the crime rate would drop.
GK has it right, without more data these statistics mean nothing.
You could also say that CCTV cameras cause crime. Because they are more likely to put them in high crime areas after a year you can say "Hey look! Wherever we have cameras we have tons of crime!!!"
Not that I'm a fan of government surveillance on their own citizens.
OK, there's not enough data in this report, but surely, if CCTV's were the magic bullet they are purported to be, then why havn't the levels of crime solution increased? Surely their effectiveness should be demonstrable somehow.
So let's have the response from the authorities disputing this report and giving us the numbers. Anybody know where those figures can be found? That would really shed light here.
I dunno, it seems to me that if you want to catch someone littering, these cameras are great, but if I was gonna rip off a liquor store or plant a bomb, I'm pretty sure I would wear a mask, or sunglasses and a baseball cap. Or should we make those illegal?
What about the bombing in the tube? Those perps were caught on CCTV, and this neither prevented the crime, nor lead to the apprehension of the suspects.
I'm not pro-crime, and I have "nothing to hide," but I resist being monitored every second, in private or in public. Why is that so hard to understand?
"If you really think that more cops on the beat can prevent crime then you have absolutely no idea how the police operate."(#4)
Care to enlighten us, the ignorant masses?
One of the recurring themes of the now-mostly-dead Policeman's Blog is that with all the cameras, British prosecutors just aren't interested in taking any case that doesn't have CCTV evidence. With all the cameras out there, magistrates and juries expect to see photographic evidence, and a prosecutor who can't deliver is going to lose.
This is one of the big dangers of surveillance -- ineffective surveillance creates demand for effective surveillance.
I think a useful piece of companion data for this would be how many crimes are being reported.
Are the CCTV cameras resulting in detection of more crimes, out of proportion of population growth? Because if the cops are finding out about more crimes, and solving more crimes, but the rate of crime detection thanks to CCTV is higher than the rate of crime solution thanks to CCTV, you'd see results like that.
Jeffrey McManus (4), I don't know about your city, but putting more cops on the beat -- on foot, not in cars -- has done wonders for mine.
Given the things that these stats measure flail about wildly depending on just about anything, these numbers are as suspect as anything else that comes out of the UK police. Cleanup rate is about the worst of the lot. This isn't just me talking, it's the police themselves: go read their blogs: they may disagree on some issues, but they all agree that the stats they gather are complete timeawsting, beancounting nonsense.
When someone went door to door asking people for sponsorship money, and someone got suspicious and called the police, and and the fake-sponsorship gal confessed to scamming... dozens of PCSOs (sort of baby-cops) went door to door to find anyone who had given money. Each one was a separate "crime" and as they were all resolved, it did wonders for that area's cleanup rate. If she'd scammed the same woman 200 times, it would have been a single incident, but as it was 200 people, it was 200 incidents, all cleaned up in one day! Which was good because for a few days the police in that area could actually do real work without worrying about government targets for a while.