CCTV: Be part of an experiment
Closed circuit television. Are we watched by too many cameras, or too few? In fact, how many cameras are there? It seems even the experts don't know.
The Association of Chief Police Officers told iPM that several forces are trying to count up the cameras on their patches. But with CCTV on buses, in shops, at sports grounds, on gate posts and street corners, a camera census could be a dizzying task.
The quantity - and quality - of CCTV coverage is a subject of great interest to iPM listeners. Several entries in our Listeners' Opinion Poll have mentioned the cameras.
Albertina McNeill, for example, would like a camera installed in the underpass near her house after a man was recently murdered there.
But not everyone feels comforted by the presence of cameras. Listener Conrad Costa (pictured above) emailed to say he was shocked when his council installed its 100th camera. As an experiment, Conrad and I went for a walk through the city counting all the cameras that we could see.
The iPM CCTV experiment
In our 15-minute journey, Conrad thought we'd find 12, in fact he counted 30. What about you? When you next set out on an everyday journey on foot - to buy a pint of milk say, or to go to your allotment - count up the cameras you pass.
During a ten or 15-minute stroll you might see cameras on lamp posts, buildings, shop doorways or car parks. There might be more than you expected, or fewer than you'd like. Tell us, explaining your journey and your final tally of cameras.
Leave in the comments below, email us or tweet.
The iPM CCTV experiment EXTRA
If you're really taken with the idea, listener Andy Cade, who teaches graphic communication, has designed a poster which you can print off - it looks a bit like one of those eye tests. It asks anyone watching the camera footage to email iPM.
PDF file: Can You See Me? (73 KB)
And please, no risk taking on behalf of the BBC - just hold it aloft and smile.
Send your count to us in an email or leave a comment on the blog.
UPDATE: Following a debate (below) Andy Cade has designed a NEW poster. Use either. iPM loves both designs.
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Comments
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Chris:
I think that there are way too many cameras....
~Dennis Junior~
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
I fail to see what all the fuss is about. What is Conrad Costa doing that he doesn't want to have filmed?
I don't see any problem with the council or police filming in public areas or with companies filming on their property. The vast majority of the time the footage is never reviewed, but if there's a chance that the presence of cameras can help solve or even deter crime & disorder I think it's a good thing.
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WHATEVER I'm doing I don't want it filmed - unless I SAY so. I'd've thought a right to privacy was BASIC.
And WHO are these people WATCHING the CCTV cameras? Who qualifies THEM?
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@MartinPacker What's the difference between a policeman or PCSO in the street or a member of staff in a shop watching you do something & a remote CCTV operator?
As for privacy, do you think you are invisible to the human eye & only detectable by camera when you're out? The addition of cameras to the street does not affect how private your actions are.
Besides, if you're just going about your lawful business do you really think that you are going to be of any interest to a CCTV operator? I don't. Even if you did something that amused an operator enough for them to want to take a closer look, they don't know who you are; privacy through obscurity.
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AFAIK Kenilworth's only got a few cameras dotted around. Leamington's probably got loads (after all, it is popular with students and apparently has an active "night life").
As for privacy, the CCTV camera operators almost certainly don't know who you are and can't identify you / track down your name, address, phone number etc. just by watching you. During busy periods in particular, you're just an anonymous face in the crowd unless you do something fairly drastic to mark you out. During quieter periods, you may be watched for the sole reason you're the only person the camera's picking up (and you're far more likely to get noticed if you drop litter or you fail to pick up your dog's litter).
Besides which, most cameras have a 360° pivot, so if you think you in particular are being watched, just move a few paces to the left / right. If the camera follows you, you know you're being watched, so behave yourself and smile / wave / unfold and display your iPM poster :)
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Actually, looking at the poster above, it was only when I read the description that I worked out what it was saying.
The fact that the last two letters of CAN and the first letter of YOU spell a word in themselves discourage the eye from reading the whole thing as a continuous bunch of text.
How about adding an extra line so it reads:
C
AN
YOU
SEEME?
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Thanks for the feedback mittfh. I have revised the poster accordingly and sent it to iPM for consideration. They need to replace the PDF on site anyway as it has lost it's Question mark at the end.
I wouldn't seek to offend the punctuationally, punctilious PM listeners.
FYI I originally sent three posters using alternative copylines to iPM and before you could say CCTV one was chosen and posted on the site.
It seems like an interesting experiment.
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There are no CCTV cameras between my home and my place of work But at my place of work, a book wholesaler in Norwich, there are loads!
As I sit here I am looking at one looking at me but as it is behind my PC monitor it can't see that I am actually not working at all but blogging......DOH!
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6 within 20 yards of my practice. 2 of my own inside the building, 2 outside the night club next door and two council/police ones.
As for the eye test chart. New test charts have same number of letters per line. Its more accurate but don't get me started.
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I'm not sure what this exercise is intended to achieve. This 'camera count' seems something of a gimmick.
It isn't, perhaps, the use of cctv evidence in serious crime investigation that people object to, but the trivial stuff. Do a news search on 'cctv' here at the Beeb, and see what pops up. Some of it is deadly serious, but there appear to be uses referred to that are plain nonsensical. CCTV in trouble spots, fine. Blanketing the country on the off-chance, not fine.
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"council installed it's100th camera."
"it has lost it's Question mark"
"I wouldn't seek to offend the punctuationally, punctilious PM listeners"
*shakes head*
"Its" not "It's"
What do you mean, too much time on my hands?
:o)
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We have a Hotel - and four camera's that cover the main areas. Hall, Reception, Dining Room, and Entrance.
Last year we had a burglar - and although we identified the culprit, he was never caught - however the Police were very impressed with the quality and copied the video ont o a DVD. It also allowed them to get the intruders fingerprints.
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Oh dear Jonnie, in the interests of fairness between froggers, I have to point out your unnecessary ' in cameras. Tell you what, if you slip it into "intruders fingerprints", then I'll let you off with a caution......
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Regardless of the civil liberty issues vs the 'you've not anything to worry about if you're not hiding something' debate, perhaps we should be asking two main questions - does CCTV
a) help deter crime and
b) help solve crimes
There have been countless studies done on the efficacy of CCTV in various countries. When all these are analysed they tend to show the following:
a) apart from a few well publicised cases it does not tend to solve crime, and on the other side of the coin there have been prosecutions of innocent people from 'wrong' CCTV 'evidence'.
b) most CCTV schemes are ineffective at solving crime because they are not staffed, resourced or run properly (and rarely linked to the police), and what information they provide is often incomplete, or at worst, 'wrong' - the camera can and does lie.
c) CCTV does not deter crime - it merely shifts the problem to another area not covered by CCTV.
d) Where it does deter it's normally only effective in car parks, and then car thieves merely target non-CCTV covered car parks.
e) they increase the publics fear of crime - not unnaturally the public tend to assume that the presence of CCTV is proof that there is a crime problem in that area - even if there is not. A similar effect is noticeable with an increased 'bobby on the beat' presence.
My conclusion is that the only people who gain from the explosion of CCTV we've witnessed over the last few years are the security companies - who are laughing all the way to the bank, often with money therefore provided by the taxpayer. The public lose by a) providing so much capital and running costs from taxes and local rates b) their increased fear of crime that has numerous side effects. The police lose by wasting time wading through hours of useless coverage.
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I live a few minutes walk from the site of a recent murder. It happened in a deserted underpass that pedestrians are afraid to use even during the day, consequently they risk their lives by running across the slip roads. This has already cost one man his life.
I believe that, in this case, CCTV would not have prevented the murder as the police would only have arrived once it had happened and the person responsible could have been hooded up and then abandoned the clothes they were wearing. However CCTV could have followed the progress of the car driven by the burglars who kicked open our front door in broad daylight and attempted to rob us.
I have come to the conclusion that CCTV works in certain situations and not others and that nothing beats the presence of a real police officer. Consequently I an trying to get a 24 hour police presence in the aforementioned underpass. The murder has robbed me of any humour where CCTV is concerned, especially as the culprit is still at large.
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Today's 25-minute walk between Glasgow Central station and work: directly caught on 20 cameras, skimmed round the edge of another 5 cameras' field of view.
Many of those 25 cameras were part of a cluster with as many as five cameras pointing in different directions. I didn't count all of them, only the ones pointing directly at me.
Do I feel safer? Hah.
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CCTV *could* work as a live system in situations where a bobby on the beat couldn't.
Imagine a town centre with a defined network of streets and limited exits. If a police officer follows a regular pattern to their beat, there's a chance a clued-up thief could time his deed for when the police officer is at the opposite end of their beat.
However, if the town centre is covered by CCTV cameras, and the same police officer as a direct audio link to a live operator, they could be directed to apprehend the thief either in the act or in the getaway process.
However, in reality the CCTV images from several towns are likely to be monitored from a single control centre, and in the event of a crime being noticed happening in real time, police officers who will probably be based at the station 5 minutes drive down the road wouldn't have time to apprehend the thief unless the thief was particularly slow and incompetent.
And they are usually hopeless at catching criminals after the event, as if the images shown on Crimewatch (usually at least 6 months after the event) are anything to go by, they're low resolution, out of focus, and with a dodgy exposure to boot. Ideally, for corporate cameras at least, something like the imagery quality of a digital stills camera, only activated after hours, and with a PIR detector to turn the camera on and swivel it to point in the direction of the activity might stand a better chance of capturing some usable imagery of the miscreants. Assuming they're not wearing hoodies...
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I live in Bury St Edmunds - not a very high crime rate, here. However, there is a lot of vandalism in a few streets where I live, on Friday and Saturday nights when cars and front gardens get damaged by people who think it's funny when they're drunk! The town has roving CCTV cameras that appear on lampposts in peculiar places. One appeared at the end of my road. My house is only the second in a row of terraces but the terrace does start about 50m down the road from this CCTV camera. Some large terracotta pots were moved from my front garden and smashed on the pavement. As an isolated incident, quite trivial, but as one in a constant stream of incidents happening to me and my neighbours it was extremely annoying. I called the police to report it and asked if the camera had caught the incident and I was told that the range of the camera didn't reach my house - it being only the second house down the road from the camera! What a nonsense.
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@ thefordie:
conrad costa is probably not doing much wrong. that's why he objects to having his images recorded or why he would not want his DNA stored on a national database.
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i am not against cctv installed on say a company's premises for the purposes of crime solution and/or prevention (if applicable). what i don't like is the installation of 100s of cameras by Government or Local Councils, who may use the data under 'terrorism laws' to monitor our moves. don;t believe me?
remember the family who was monitored by the council under terror legislation in cctv to make sure their children were going to the proper school (catchment area issues)?
or the council that used terror laws to identify 'dog foulers'?
'terror legislation' is so cloudy that gov't used it in 2008 to 'freeze' icelandic assets in the UK following the icelandic bank crisis. with not so much of a whimper in protest at this by anybody.
with the advent of biometric passports/ID cards, will biometric data from cctv images be stored somewhere, thus keeping a nice 'map' of its citizens' moves.
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@ conradcosta unfortunately cameras are not yet discerning enough to be able to ignore people who are "probably not doing much wrong". fortunately, I imagine most CCTV operators are far too busy to take any notice of people that are just going about there daily lives.
Frankly I'd be amazed anything ever happened to you as a result of your being caught on camera (or having your DNA on a database for that matter), assuming you're not doing anything you shouldn't.
I suggest you have a nice cup of tea and find something else to worry about, it looks like it might rain.
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Many independent studies in the USA and UK have suggested that CCTV surveillance acts as a great prevention, stopping crimes before they occur. The men believed to have been responsible for the July terrorist attacks on London’s public transport system were later identified on the prevalent CCTV networks in the U.K.’s public places.
by: http://www.securitymax.co.uk
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