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| Can CCTV reduce crime? |
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Glowing reports of the
effectiveness of CCTV are announced regularly. Strathclyde police
in Scotland recently claimed a 75 per cent drop in crime following
the installation of a ?¨º130,000 closed circuit TV system in Airdrie.
Not only are people delighted because they are no longer afraid to
go out shopping, say local police, but even criminals welcome the
chance to prove their innocence by calling on evidence from the cameras.
In King's Lynn, burglary and vandalism in the industrial estate has
dropped to a tiny fraction of its original level. Crime in car parks
has dropped by ninety per cent. People say they feel safer. Indeed
they should. Assaults and other violent crimes appear also to have
been decimated in the center of town.
The government believes this is because CCTV deters 'opportunistic'
crime, where people take advantage of a situation on the spur of the
moment. Phillip Edwards from the Home Office Crime Prevention Unit
says the government is using CCTV as part of a long term plan to reduce
overall crime. "Today's opportunist is tomorrow's professional
criminal. If we decrease the number of opportunities for easy crime,
we can reduce the number of people becoming professional criminals".
The logic, and the statistics, are superficially impressive, but some
analysts are not convinced. In a report to the Scottish Office on
the impact of CCTV, Jason Ditton, Director of the Scottish Centre
for Criminology, argued that many claims of crime reduction are little
more than fantasy. "All (evaluations and statistics) we have
seen so far are wholly unreliable", The British Journal of Criminology
went further by describing the statistics as "....post hoc shoestring
efforts by the untrained and self interested practitioner ".
The crime reduction claims being made by CCTV proponents are not convincing.
Three recent criminological reports (Home Office, Scottish Office
and Southbank University) have discredited the conventional wisdom
about the cameras effectiveness. In a report to the Scottish Office
on the impact of CCTV, Jason Ditton, Director of the Scottish Centre
for Criminology, argued that the claims of crime reduction are little
more than fantasy. "All (evaluations and statistics) we have
seen so far are wholly unreliable", The British Journal of Criminology
described the statistics as "....post hoc shoestring efforts
by the untrained and self interested practitioner." In short,
the crime statistics are without credibility.
The crime statistics rarely, if ever, reflect the hypothesis that
CCTV merely displaces criminal activity to areas outside the range
of the cameras. One of the features of current surveillance practice
is that the cameras are often installed in high-rent commercial areas.
Crime may be merely pushed from high value commercial areas into low
rent residential areas. Councils often find that it is impossible
to resist demands for such systems. There is an additional element
of displacement that should be of particularly concern to all communities.
Since the growth of CCTV as the primary means of crime prevention,
more traditional, community based measures have been discarded.
A Scottish Centre for Criminology report on CCTV in Airdre was unable
to rule out displacement as a factor. while various studies in other
countries indicate that burglars and other criminals will travel long
distances to commit crimes. Discussing the justification for establishing
a surveillance system of 16 cameras in Manchester, Gordon Conquest,
chairman of the city centre sub committee of Manchester Council, candidly
admitted "No crackdown on crime does more than displace it, and
that's the best we can do at the moment."
The Crime Prevention Unit of the Home Office appears to agree. In
1993 it suppressed the findings of a survey on the crime impact of
camera surveillance on the basis that the displacement effect had
been all but ignored. In other words, crime may be merely pushed from
high value commercial areas into low rent residential areas. One of
the features of current surveillance practice is that the cameras
are often installed in high-rent commercial areas. Councils often
find that it is impossible to resist demands for such systems. The
trend is fueled in part by the insurance industry, which in some towns
is offering a thirty per cent reduction in premiums to local retailers
who pay a contribution to a CCTV levy system. A nationwide insurance
discount scheme is currently being negotiated, and should be in place
by 1996.
Some police also concede that CCTV displaces crime. Richard Thomas,
Acting Deputy Chief Constable for Gwent, recently told the BBC's Andrew
Neil that he believed CCTV pushed some crime beyond the range of the
cameras. And in his interview with 20/20, Leslie Sharp said "Certainly
the crime goes somewhere. I don't believe that just because you've
got cameras in a city center that everyone says 'Oh well, we're going
to give up crime and get a job".
The cameras are also creating a vastly increased rate of conviction
after crimes are detected. Virtually everyone caught committing an
offense on camera pleads guilty nowadays. Once people know they have
been videotaped, they admit the offense immediately. Such is also
the case in Newcastle, where the installation in 1992 of a 16 camera
system has resulted in a 100 per cent incidence of guilty pleas. Police
are delighted at the time and money they are saving from long and
expensive trials. Some legal experts are a little more wary of the
implications of these results, arguing that - like DNA evidence -
juries can be seduced and defendants intimidated in equal proportions
by evidence that might not normally stand up to scrutiny. Indeed some
districts are now reporting that people are surrendering after the
mere mention in newspaper reports that their alleged activities had
been captured on CCTV.
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