Is CCTV Losing its Power?
This week, a prominent police officer expressed concern that despite the enormous amount of money and time spent filling the UK’s streets and buildings with cameras, the number of convictions brought about by their existence is pitifully small.
Mick Neville, head of Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard believes they no longer represent a significant obstacle or threat to criminals due to the number of systems that are not operational and the fact police increasingly try to avoid searching through CCTV evidence.
There is a certain similarity to speed cameras, in that people become less concerned that they’ll be convicted of speeding the more times they go past a camera and fail to be sent a ticket through the post. You naturally begin to weigh up the chances of getting caught and (some people) consider it worth the risk.
Considering the amount of money that has been spent over the past few decades on CCTV equipment it seems almost criminal itself that more has not been done to ensure its overall effectiveness. Perhaps the most damaging aspect is that there hasn’t been a cohesive effort to determine whether CCTV is employed strictly as a deterrent or as a method of convicting people after a criminal act has been committed.
As Mick Neville said earlier this week, it was originally seen as a preventative measure, but it seems that years of ineffective use have seriously degraded that potential, in the short term at least. The problem now is that in order to prove its worth, operators of CCTV systems and the police will need to increase the number of convictions, and this will need a serious amount of change to areas such as signage.
EPA reported in the March issue that a lack of knowledge relating to the Data Protection Act will inevitably hamper attempts to convict people on the basis of CCTV footage and key to this is the correct deployment of signs indicating that cameras are in use in a particular area. Currently the majority of systems have inadequate warning signs both in terms of their number and their positioning which also rather goes against the theory of CCTV as a deterrent. If people don’t know they’re there, how will they be deterred by them?
That said, this is again a great opportunity for people involved with either the manufacturing or installation of security systems to set about improving the way the UK manages its private and public security frameworks. So, with the IFSEC exhibition coming up next week in Birmingham, it will be interesting what the industry has up its sleeve in order to do this.
Richard Scott
Editor