Image credit: Getty Images, Richard Newstead/Flickr
While the British government has spent an estimated £500m on CCTV cameras there continues to be both doubts over their effectiveness and concerns for their social impact. There are over a million cameras in the UK but the BBC says that an internal police report says they rarely help British authorities catch criminals:
In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers [in London]. 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.”
BBC NEWS | UK | England | London | 1,000 cameras ’solve one crime’
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With the British Crime Survey reporting that there were 12.3 million crimes commited against home owners last year this means that we only need 12,300,000,000 cameras to live in a crime free society! Way to go Team UK!!
August 27th, 2009 at 1:46 pm