Author: Tim Newburn and Stephanie Hayman
ISBN No: 1-903240-50-6
Review date: 06/12/2025
No of pages: 208
Publisher: Willan Publishing, Culmcott House, Mill Street, Uffculme, Cullompton, Devon EX15 3AT, phone 01884 840337
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
Academic study of CCTV has suffered from an obsession with public space, usually town centre, surveillance, when it has been bothered at all.
Academic study of CCTV has suffered from an obsession with public space, usually town centre, surveillance (when it has been bothered at all). So a new book by Professor Tim Newburn makes a welcome change. Despite the forbidding title – Policing, Surveilllance and Social Control – the book covers quite a small CCTV system, ‘the Kilburn experiment’, cameras in Kilburn police station and cells. It’s a neat subject because it ties in so many concerns about cameras – such as privacy, human rights law. A custody suite is neither public nor private; cameras there protect the vulnerable from harm, but (as the research showed) people who culturally are sensitive about privacy when they go to the toilet do not like the idea of being filmed going to the lavatory in a cell. Is it OK to forfeit your right to cell privacy to bolster your protection against self-harm or misbehaviour by the police? Most detainees when interviewed for the book thought it indeed OK. There’s a twist; in the custody suite, detainee and police officer alike are ‘watched’. Users of CCTV must never forget the power of cameras as a symbol, besides what the cameras actually do. In the case of prison cell cameras, the Metropolitan Police was telling multi-culutral communities that the Met would protect prisoners. The book shows how the Met was afraid that continuously-monitored CCTV in cells (besides the less controversial booking areas and cell corridors) would infringe article eight of the Human Rights Act (right to a private life). Clearly the Met’s overriding aim was to prevent deaths in custody, such as a death in a cell in nearby Harlesden in 1997 that resulted in an inquest ‘open’ verdict. The Kilburn experiment installers were ClearView Communications as part of their contract with the Met to install CCTV in all custody suites. This pilot began in March 2000. Recording of 17 cameras is time-lapse on six VCRs; tapes are changed three times a day. Two monitors stand on the booking desk. While a monitor can show 16 cells at once, in practice the screen showed four. The video recording equipment is under surveillance, but a property cupboard where tapes go before final storage (in filing cabinets in a room that gets hot in summer) is not covered by CCTV. The researchers do not comment except to mention concerns that tapes ‘might deteriorate’. Detainees and police officers confirmed that CCTV boosted professionalism within the custody suite, that the researchers describe as ‘at times … unnervingly busy and fraught’. Private security staff mill around the booking desk, anxious to be on the road; detainees may be drunk, mentally ill, in need of an interpreter. To their credit the authors do not bury us in criminological theory, or cry ‘big brother’. They do call the Kilburn experiment ‘enormously’ intrusive, but point out that here is surveillance with more than one face. Yes, one face intrudes; the other protects. As the authors conclude: ‘We have come to accept that these two competing claims are sometimes irreconcilable and that under some circumstances one must, inevitably, have primacy over the other.’ Bravo, I say, to such even-handed, well-presented research. Some questions only time will answer: will police use cell footage in court’ If in-cell CCTV is to counter public distrust, should police monitor their own premises, on-site’ Why not put it on the internet’ the authors wonder.
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Prof Newburn is Director of the Public Policy Research Unit, Goldsmiths College, University of London, the author of The Future of Policing (Oxford University Press, 1998) and Private Security and Public Policing (Clarendon Press, 1999). He chairs the Advisory Group of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Violence Research Programme, featured in our October issue.<br>
