"Fewer than one crime is solved by every 1,000 closed circuit television cameras, the Metropolitan Police, Britain's biggest police force, has admitted."
Telegraph.co.uk
I noticed this because of a quote from Sir Ian Gandalf-Magneto-McKellan in the Prisoner thread (props to Ghadis), replicated here for convenience;
"There's been no law passed to have all this surveillance. We weren't asked what we thought about it. It's all for our own good, we're told. I'm resisting strongly, trying to get out of my suburban street what a lot of the locals want there, which is constant CCTV. I don't want it. I don't want people to know who comes knocking at my door or who I ask into my house. The war on terror as a concept is catch-all, isn't it? If you object to television in the streets, you're supposed to be on the wrong side in the war on terror. Well, then I'm on the wrong side"
I'm with Sir Ian, the voice of Iorek Byrnison, but above and beyond the ethical considerations the cameras seem to be massively ineffective, here's some figures;
"£500million was spent on new cameras in the 10 years to 2006...
Britain has 1 per cent of the world’s population but around 20 per cent of its CCTV cameras"
And the crimes they *do* help with seem to be car break-ins rather than (say) violent crime;
"Earlier this year separate research commissioned by the Home Office suggested that the cameras had done virtually nothing to cut crime, but were most effective in preventing vehicle crimes in car parks."
So the UK has spent hundreds of millions of pounds to make parking slightly safer... |
