Photo: Improbulus on Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA.
UK has one CCTV camera per fourteen citizens according to a research paper released in 2002 and in the harsh financial climate now facing the world the local councils in Britain has started slashing the funding used to actually monitor the cameras.
From Daily Mail (via Schneier):
“Once, Britain was the most watched nation in the world, with more than 4 million CCTV cameras monitoring our every move.
But now in these difficult economic times, it seems that Big Brother isn’t actually watching, in fact no one is.
As cash-strapped police forces and councils around the UK are forced to tighten their belts in the recession, CCTV cameras around town centres are being left unmanned as they can’t afford to pay anyone to watch out for crime as it happens.
Instead, entire networks of surveillance cameras are being effectively put on auto-pilot, with police reviewing tapes only after a reported incident.”
Does it take a recession to make people realize that an annual expense of ~£50 million on CCTV is excessive? That it never was useful? That the cost is too high in relation to what you might gain (if any)? This just verifies that the presented image of CCTV as a tool for crime prevention is false.
An another citation from the same article as above:
While in Dorset, police resorted to advertising for unpaid civilian volunteers to monitor CCTV footage after claiming that it was not cost effective to pay trained professionals.
In June Dorset Police appealed for members of the public to watch live images from street security cameras in Wimborne, Blandford, Shaftesbury and Gillingham to help spot crimes and anti-social behaviour.
Civilian volunteers? Spot “anti-social behaviour”? Since when does an untrained civilian make an educated decision on when someone is acting anti-social? That’s like asking for false positives… deluxe version…
Read the full article…
