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.'"

Thats some dangerous thinking there SpuriouisLogic

[pwnies]

Thats some dangerous thinking there SpuriousLogic. I think someone wants to visit the Ministry of Love.

London gets future-crime predicting CCTV cameras

[David Gerard]

The Greater London Assembly is introducing CCTV cameras claimed to "predict" if a crime is about to take place [today.com] and alert operators to suspicious behaviour, such as loitering, apparent thought in public, walking while brown or not spending money fast enough.

Anyone spotted may then have to explain their behaviour to a police officer. "Tough on lack of consumer confidence, tough on the causes of lack of consumer confidence," said Nick Hewitson of EDS Capita Goatse SmartCCTV. ("Consumer confidence" is a technical economics jargon term measuring willingness to casually spend ridiculous sums of cash on idiotic rubbish, particularly while drunk.)

"Only a criminal terrorist paedophile with something to hide could possibly object," said councillor Jason Fazackarley. "Criminals will pay much better attention to their dress and grooming with cameras there. Channel 4 has tentatively offered us a reality TV show. And Channel 5 would quite like the tapes of drunken shagging in shop delivery bays."

The project has been compared to the Tom Cruise science-fiction film Minority Report, in which psychic journalists are arrested on CCTV before they commit the crime of not peppering articles with the most obvious possible cliches copied from other papers.

However, Stephen Fry has delivered a crushing blow to the project with an unfortunately-timed negative review on his Twitter feed: "++ungood crimethink brb txtspk lol."

Re:Sure, but...

[WindowlessView]

While I personally don't think that they're much of a deterrent,

Sometimes they are just an amusement.

My local Dunkin Donuts is about 60 feet by 30 feet and has, count 'em, 13 of those dark plastic ceiling bubbles. I think they should hold a contest and give out free donuts to anyone who can guess exactly how many of them actually contain a camera.

Oh, and the place has been robbed twice in the last year.

Re:London gets future-crime predicting CCTV camera

[jaxtherat]

Best. Post. Ever.

Re:Wrong conclusion. This is about saving LIVES ja

[Flere Imsaho]

"...of course these should have big-assed shotguns"

There, fixed that for you.

8 out of 269 robbers captured? Obviously...

[straponego]

If we had 33.625 times as many cameras, ALL the robbers would have been captured.

Re:ONE THOUSAND?!

[uwnav]

I appreciate what you're saying. but I don't think the comparison exists. There is nothing ethically dubious about CCTVs. (see Satellite surveillance). These tools are used in retrospect. They are essentially adding eye-witnesses to things that could potentially have had eye witnesses to begin with. Am I misunderstanding something fundamental here? because I don't get pissed off at the fact that every ATM machine I use has a camera on it. From a person/legal/ethical standpoint I see nothing wrong with CCTVs in public places.