Only one crime was solved by 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.
In other vaguely unrelated crime news:
– Brit gov may inact laws that cut off Interwebitube access for file sharing.
– And from our side of the pond, Texas admits they executed an innocent man whose entire prosecution was based on lies.
GREAT picture Uncy Dave!
Be seeing you!
(sarcasm)
Wow, it works so well we should have more of it here in the USA.
(sarcasm-end)
Security cameras are like alarm systems. They aren’t there to catch criminals, they are there to deter criminal behavior. That being said, I wouldn’t want to live with all those cameras!
white collar crime does not have enough cameras
but I know that somewhere Goldman Sucks is up to no good as is the federal reserve
Hey, don’t worry about Texas. Conservatives assure us that it would be a much greater calamity for a guilty person to go free than for an innocent person to be murdered by the state.
It has to do with Respect for Life, or something…
Ha! Now go and take them all out!
If you can…
You thought those cameras were there to deter crime?
They can’t deter crime if they DON’T WORK.
Now now lets not let the facts get in the way of good intentions. It’s for your own good.
The linked article is non sensible: “”We estimate more than 70% of murder investigations have been solved with the help of CCTV retrievals.”
#3 started off well because like alarms, cameras are meant to deter crime, but they have the added advantage of catching criminals who perform in front of them. BASE LINE info to make this value judgment simple is missing. It may not even be available: what happened to the crime stats where the camera’s are located? If total crime for London stayed the same and simply moved around, then maybe more cameras are needed?
Does anyone here think many criminals would commit a crime right in front of a camera?
It reminds me of dna testing. Its getting reported more and more often that dna samples in felony crime cases are not even being tested due to expense. I wonder if security camera footage is even being looked at?
Skynet will remove the human error.
So install one billion cameras and you solve one million crimes.
Yeah, we can watch police brutality from every angle.
London 1979 BC (Before Cameras), a flasher in every public park, a walk to the corner shop in the evening meant taking a concealed club with you, at pub closing time gangs of teenagers urinated through people’s letter boxes on their way to a kebab shop. All gone, forgotten like tears in the rain, thanks to police cameras and the Taser Corporation.
Geesh, what a spin. Looking at it the other way… 1000 crimes were SOLVED in one year because of the cameras.
And also FTA…”A spokesman for the Met said: “We estimate more than 70% of murder investigations have been solved with the help of CCTV retrievals and most serious crime investigations have a CCTV investigation strategy.”
They probably reduced the cost of prosecution as well… caught on video leads little to doubt.
Still think they are useless?
Define ‘with the help of’ – 2 schoolkids were murdered in a small village near here by someone they knew – in his house.
The TV continually showed a grainy CCTV picture of them leaving a shop earlier in the day. Completely irrelevent – they were seen after the pictures – but it was a victory for CCTV and the village soon got lots more cameras.
#13: Nice Blade Runner reference!
#15.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOphFl88U-g
So what I gather is that the cameras may be of help in major crime investigation (looking at film after the fact).
I am curious to know if the police use the cameras in low priority property crimes such as vandalism, simple robbery, pickpockets, etc. Or is there even the manpower to try to use them in this capacity? My guess is that the use of the images to find the perpetrator has more to do with who the victim knows than any other factor.
Why isn’t the innocent man executed story worthy of its own thread?
It basically wipes out in one fell swoop every talking point of the pro death penalty crowd.
It is time to end the death penalty NOW!!
When witnesses lie people die. I would do unto them as they did unto others.
#19 Texas long ago came down on the side of quick trials and quick executions. Actually getting it right takes a backseat.
I love the extremes. You hear them expressed in outrageously distorted plans concocted by politicians all the time, following this format:
If we spend (an ungodly amount of money)
and it saves just one (1)
child from (frowning for instance)
for (a few moments or similar),
then it would have all been worth it.
Bull puckey.
Texas killing people, innocent people, while their governor cravenly jokes about it, is old news.
Still–thanks ArianneB==the throw away really is worth its own post.
EDITOR==CONSIDER POSTING THE SINGLE ITEM. Of course, I’m happy to argue for the execution, even though it was the wrong thing to do.
Historically, death penalty case prosecutors in Texas have been unapologetic when later proven definitely, unequivocably wrong, even going so far as to oppose commutation of the sentence in court. “He was legally convicted in a court of law,” they’ll say, “The sentence should be carried out.”