In a report to the March 24 meeting of the British Transport Police Authority, under performance – reported crimes of various sorts are up, graffiti, trespass, assaults on rail staff – the BTP Chief Constable Lucy D’Orsi wrote that ‘CCTV quality and accessibility is an enduring priority, and we continue to advocate for upgraded, standardised systems with direct access arrangements’.
To put that into plainer English, the police habitually find that CCTV when they request it doesn’t give a sharp or detailed enough picture of a suspect, making an identification (‘ident’) difficult; and busy, inexperienced police can find it hard to know where to ask for footage.
British railways were among the earliest experimenters of what was then literally closed circuit television in the 1960s, for general platform safe working, rather than crime prevention. To give a brief history of public space CCTV: in the 1990s, the two main political parties in power, first the Conservatives before 1997 and then Labour into the early 2000s, gave hundreds of millions of pounds of central Government money to local government to set up mainly council-monitored town centre and high street CCTV. Cameras, whether monitored 24-hours or merely recording and consulted after a crime or accident or other incident, became part of the furniture whether in transport hubs, theatres, town halls and shopping centres, whether trumpeted as a ‘silver bullet’ to deter crime and wrong-doing, or more mundanely to satisfy insurers and to guard against spurious claims of ‘slips, trips or falls’.
A recent experience made me wonder quite what is the use of CCTV – the term still used although to be pedantic it no longer is accurate, given that for nigh on 20 years cameras have been transmitting over Internet Protocol (IP). The Easter holidays, and above all the summer holidays, are – though little commented on – dreaded by customer-facing staff such as at bus stations and shopping malls, for bringing out bored and anti-social youths not at school, who loiter, ride bicycles, intimidate the law-abiding and maybe do damage and thieve. At my local library shortly before closing time on the first Saturday of the holidays, I found myself unpeeling stickers (supplied by the library, promoting reading) off a seat, that presumably children had stuck on. Where had their parents been? Older children had been on the premises causing a nuisance, prompting a police community support officer and a policeman (‘real police’, as a member of library staff put it disarmingly) to attend. The upshot of the police’s telling off of the youths was that the police knew their names and addresses (which suggested repeat offending and a lack of deterrence so far?!) and if it continued, police would tell their parents and social services might visit. Such is the powerlessness of the criminal justice system, it has to threaten the anti-social with social services. Perhaps social services, equally run off their feet and powerless, threaten people with the police?
What no-one appeared to ask about was the 20-camera system at the library, which has a monitor back of house. It so happened that the stickers on the seat was a blind spot in the children’s section. Other cameras would have captured entry of the youths and what they got up to. But the police didn’t ask for a recording, because the little-remarked on reality is that when investigating crimes – such as theft from shops – cost police and courts more than it’s worth to bring a case, and any outcome in fine or other punishment wouldn’t be worth the trouble, the offence has no consequences.
Photo by Mark Rowe: public space CCTV camera and pole reflected in windows of Woolwich library, London borough of Greenwich, 2022.
