Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) is part of our everyday life. Although CCTV surveillance is not specific to the UK, the extent of its use is unique to this country. Indeed, the British are the most watched people on earth (by one estimate an average Londoner is now watched by 300 separate cameras in a single day). Cambridge has 127 cameras run by the Cambridge city council alone (not counting all the private CCTV and CCTV used for traffic control) and Cambridge is now planning to extend the scheme to new areas and update the old ones. CCTV is now widely used in public spaces including shopping centers, main urban streets, inside and outside major buildings, in lifts and in many other areas.
For more information on CCTV scheme in Cambridge go to the Cambridge City Council.
The cost :
The installation costs for Cambridge alone was close to a million pounds and the running costs are about 343,000 pounds per year. At a national level, between 1994 and 2003 the Home Office spent a total of 208 million pounds on CCTV across the country. This spending is estimated to be 3/4 th of the total spending on crime prevention by the Home Office in UK.[more]
How it works :
The Cameras in Cambridge are colour zooming and focussing cameras. The pictures are transmitted to the control room via a fibre optic cable. The image is then sent to a TV monitor as well as a video recorder. A monitor screen has also been installed at the Police headquarters in Hinchingbrook. The videos are kept for 31 days, but the Police (and other local authorities as well as bodies with prosecution power, such as Customs or the Health and Safety Executive) can request a copy of such videos.
Issues :
CCTV has been installed to address the issues of crime, but, a growing number of independent studies demonstrate they have little or no effect on reducing crime rates. The performance in this regard really depends on the type of crime, one study suggests for example that CCTV does not have any
effect on violent crime. Where CCTV seems to have an effect (such as vehicle crime), people have noticed a displacement effect. In other words, crime is moved but not reduced. The extent of CCTV coverage and funding were based on the assumption that the camera must work, and apparent public support but, at the time of installation of most of the schemes (including Cambridge which was done in 1997), no serious independent studies were carried out. Now, despite the questionable effect of CCTV on crime, more money is put into updating the existent cameras and extending the coverage to new areas. In addition, most studies have also pointed also out the discriminatory monitoring towards young men of ethnic minorities and (so-called) video voyeurism.
Certain fundamental issues have been underestimated by the authorities and the mainstream press, particularly issues regarding the cost of installation and maintenance of CCTV schemes and the real effectiveness of such schemes on stopping crime. With the advance of new technologies, privacy issues are becoming much more important. Behind the popular and very convenient perception that "if you have done nothing you have nothing to fear" lies the prospect of a broader use of CCTV not only to monitor crimes but to enforce social conformity. Philosophers such as Michel Foucault have discussed the possibility that the information society could turn into a Panopticon , an ideal prison in which the inmates restrict their own behaviour because they are always potentially under observation by the prison guards.
In the future, face recognition technology will become more and more accurate and already programs to efficiently read car license registration plates are available and in use. The city of London was thinking of using this technology to establish a database that would include all British citizens whose faces were registered in the Driving License Bureau. In this case any person could in theory be instantly identified by the police [more ].......
report from privacy international about CCTV here