What is the future of CCTV?

26/07/2010

With councils forced to justify spending on cameras, we investigate what comes next for the UK's ubiquitous crime-fighting tool

By Adam Forrest

In 1785 English social theorist Jeremy Bentham, with a creepy kind of foresight, unveiled a scheme to bring self-imposed surveillance into the criminal justice system. His circular Panopticon prison would be designed in such as way as to allow an observer in the tower to watch all prisoners without the incarcerated being able to tell whether they are being watched or not. Even if the watchman was not on duty, offenders would police their own behaviour, assuming he could be watching. “Morals reformed… public burdens lightened… a new mode of obtaining power over the mind… all by a simple idea in architecture!” enthused Bentham.

Walking around Glasgow city centre with Paul Mackie, a security expert concerned with Data Protection Act compliance, I’m struck not by the huge number of CCTV cameras, but by the deficiency of the system. Some are too old to record anything of “useable quality”, Mackie explains. Some are fakes, some point only at each other, some are not switched on at all. I cannot be the only one to have absorbed the idea of being watched so deeply that discovering all the inadequacies of the vast outdoor recording studio is oddly disappointing.

As we stand outside a branch of Boots, gazing at our images on the screen through the doorway, I have to fight back an urge to wave at the camera, wondering if someone might be watching, hoping my pixilated self is distinct enough to be "usable". If a pre-election pollster had asked my views on civil liberties and privacy, I would have probably ranked the ideas as at least ‘fairly important’. But it seems I’m yet another exhibitionist in a society almost entirely comfortable with watching and being watched; another willing participant in the grand Panopticon.

Our new government has murmured about regulating CCTV and made vague suggestions about local authorities justifying their use of surveillance systems. Despite the handwringing about jumped-up little Hitlers at the council prying into our car-parking and bin-emptying habits, the most fundamental fears around CCTV are no longer about Big Brother exerting control. In the brave new world of impoverished public spending, less abstract concerns stand out. At least £500m of taxpayers’ money has already been invested in CCTV. Are these cameras proving value for money? Are they really helping to cut crime?

Many academics are skeptical that remote surveillance has done much to alter levels of criminal and anti-social behaviour. At the beginning of the CCTV boom in the early 1990s, when the Home Office was delighted to invest wherever a local authority showed interest, there was blind faith in the power of the camera to promote ‘community safety’– the mantra of many MPs, councillors and residents groups.

Criminologist Nic Groombridge, who conducted one of the first Home Office reports into CCTV in 1994, foresaw how failure would lead to further expansion. “It hasn’t worked in the way it was sold originally, as a crime prevention tool,” he explains.

“The thinking was: if you were being watched, surely you wouldn’t possibly commit a crime. But watching Crimewatch every week, we know that’s not the case. We see criminals waving at the camera. Instead of thinking about if something works or not, there is always a feeling it will work once you spend more money and the technology is better. If the camera didn’t catch the incident, it means we need more cameras. It’s a vast money pit, delivering very little other than profit for the manufacturers.”

A 2005 Home Office study by Professor Martin Gill – often cited in the absence of much other research – evaluated the impact of 14 CCTV systems around Britain. Only two areas showed a significantly clear decrease in crime, seven saw an increase, although attributing either trend to CCTV was made difficult by “confounding variables”. Gill remains dubious about the huge expenditure.

“Part of the problem is it makes so much footage available, which makes for a mammoth task for the police to bring the data together and try to use it in the criminal justice system,” he says. “Until we start treating images as important bits of evidence, then we’re not going to use it to maximum effect.”


FOI requests conducted by civil liberties group Big Brother Watch revealed there are now almost 60,000 CCTV cameras operated by local authorities in the UK. Although the council CCTV control rooms are often run in partnership with police forces, there is also the vast legion of less regulated, less effective camera systems used by private businesses. Big Brother Watch's Dylan Sharpe calls the ubiquity of CCTV a "triumph of PR over success rates".

Pro-privacy groups claim there are three to four million cameras in the UK. The figures cause CCTV advocates consternation, but there is little to suggest the actual total is significantly more modest than the guesstimates. It is not only the libertarians and academics who are concerned about CCTV’s rate of success in the criminal justice system. Monitoring or sifting through the untold hours of tedious, poor-quality material means an uphill struggle to create effective evidence.

Police officers are often sent out to collect grainy footage from ageing systems that many small businesses find too costly to upgrade. A 2007 Home Office study said 80 per cent of the images from CCTV cameras aren’t good enough to be used in court.

There are the inevitable limitations on the number of hours staff can monitor, and incidents will be missed even where there is the facility to zoom in. There is also the problem of different recording formats – the court services have often struggled to convert back and forth between digital and analogue. Times and dates can be incorrectly logged. Data can be deleted by the time it might be relevant to a fresh investigation.

DCI Mick Neville, who heads up the Met’s CCTV unit, has also acknowledged the pressure when officers are expected to look for and share data at speed across police forces. According to Neville, only three per cent of London’s street robberies are solved using security cameras.

Despite all the limitations, police forces are still firmly behind CCTV. In high-profile investigations it still proves extremely useful in identifying times, dates and the whereabouts of suspects. Industry advocates point towards the James Bulger murder and the 7/7 attacks, and in recent weeks the images of hunted gunman Raoul Moat in his orange T-shirt reached almost iconic status.

Simon Lambert, an independent security consultant, says criticism relates to unreachably high expectations. "A bobby on the beat can’t catch everything either, remember. Some people have an expectation that because CCTV has gone in with great fanfare, everything that happens will be caught in enough detail that the bad guys will be collared quickly and up in front of a judge."

"The criminal justice system needs to get an awful lot better at using the image evidence it has available," Lambert continues. "Clearer images will, of course, help and we are starting to see high resolution cameras. But those things aren’t cheap, and with cuts and regular commercial pressures, you need a strong argument to make the investment.”