Tally Ho

I’m sure there’s a great wailing and nashing of teeth by Westminster council, over these boys, doing their civic duty.

CCTV. FAIL.

 

A good article from over the pond on the failure of CCTV to make us anymore safer. In fact it goes on to propound that in fact they make us less safe.

Although it's comforting to imagine vigilant police monitoring every camera, the truth is very different, for a variety of reasons: technological limitations of cameras, organizational limitations of police and the adaptive abilities of criminals. No one looks at most CCTV footage until well after a crime is committed. And when the police do look at the recordings, it's very common for them to be unable to identify suspects. Criminals don't often stare helpfully at the lens and -- unlike the Dubai assassins -- tend to wear sunglasses and hats. Cameras break far too often.

In London the figures for crime solved by CCTV is 1 in every 1,000 cameras. Not a very good success rate I would have thought. And those cameras cost the taxpayer £200 million.

Source

And although a police officer on the street can respond to a crime in progress, someone watching a CCTV screen can only dispatch an officer to arrive much later. By their very nature, cameras result in underused and misallocated police resources.

I think that the £200 million would have been better spent on recruiting a few more Plods.

Full article over on CNN.

He's just noticed

A leading Barrister has only just realised what the rest of us have known for some time.

The 'Big Brother' culture is on the march across Britain, allowing the state to snoop on phone calls, emails and even walking the dog, the country's top barrister, Desmond Browne QC, has warned.

Well blow me down with a wet feather.

In a powerful attack on the "surveillance society", Mr Browne, the chairman of the Bar Council, also questioned the effectiveness of CCTV cameras in tackling anti-social behaviour.

Here are results that purport to show how useless these monstrous machines are in protecting us.

In August an internal report from the Metropolitan Police, Britain's biggest force, found that fewer than one crime is solved for every 1,000 CCTV cameras, raising question-marks about the effectiveness of the cameras.

Now it doesn't take a genius, (I've got an abacus), to work out that, the(nearly) one crime solved, was a cost to the taxpayer for the 1000 cameras that just about detected it , £20,000,000.
Hardly value for money.

One wonders if we could uproot the lot of them, and sell them at cut price to China. Then maybe we could have some real policing back on our streets?

The full article is over here in the Daily Telegraph

CCTV

I was just idly browsing, when I stumbled upon this on the Liberty website.

In the past decade the Home Office has spent 78% of its crime prevention budget on CCTV, before assessing its effectiveness in deterring or detecting crime.

78% of their crime prevention budget! No wonder you never see a Police Officer on the street. A quick look at the home office website to find that the cost for all those cameras came to a figure of £170,000,000.

If you look at the average Plods pay, that equates to over 5600 extra police we could have patrolling our streets.

Or , hell, 8500 PCSOs