Author: Brandon Welsh and David Farrington
ISBN No: 978-0-19-53262
Review date: 06/05/2024
No of pages: 0
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
The UK has poured hundreds of millions of pounds into public space CCTV. Was that wise? a book asks. Review from the July 2011 print issue of Professional Security magazine.
The United States after 9-11 and the Washington DC sniper of 2002 appears to have overcome its civil liberties dislike of CCTV. But when and where do cameras work best, if anywhere? As the two academic authors, who did a review for the Home Office into CCTV, put it: “CCTV had an overall small desirable effect on crime, was most effective in car parks, and had a marginal effect on crime in city and town centres (as well as in public housing) … public CCTV schemes have continued to be established unabated in the UK, seemingly without attention to these research results.” Their book reviews other academic studies of CCTV, lighting, security guards, defensible space (gates and barriers to alleys and streets of housing) and ‘place managers’ (workers such as bus drivers, who are not security people but who may deter crime by being present). My problem is that the authors take as gospel the notorious ‘estimate’ (or ‘guesstimate’) of 4.2m public CCTV cameras in the UK by Clive (now professor Clive) Norris. But as Graeme Gerrard the ACPO lead on CCTV blogged in March, that number is based on a count of cameras on one (!) street. Gerrard offers a UK total of about 1.85m public space cameras. You can argue that the problem isn’t with Norris but that no-one has put the hours in to do a better count. But if the basics are so untrustworthy, how can anyone say anything useful about anything to do with public CCTV? Briefly, Welsh and Farrington sum up that CCTV and better street lighting are better, though hardly startling, at reducing crimes against property (in car parks for instance), though not violence. Place managers (such as the ‘parkie’ or park keeper) are of ‘unknown effectiveness’. The authors do well to look into the social costs of anti-crime measures – more on-street lighting can become ‘light pollution’; surveillance may raise privacy concerns. Another gripe may be that the authors point to ‘the poor state of evaluation research on private area surveillance practices’. What of all the masters students’ dissertations at Leicester, Loughborough and Portsmouth? In fairness the authors do point to ‘biases of criminologists about what is interesting and useful’. The authors, to sum up, are not anti-CCTV; they are pro-research, and learning lessons. In their conclusion the authors point to facial recognition among technology developments. Yet – and again in fairness, the authors do flag this up – what’s the point of any surveillance, if police or others do not act on the camera images? The authors hint at wider costs and benefits – how do you put a value on personal safety? Or the feeling of parking and walking freely at night?
