07/12/2009

Cash prizes for catching criminals

There are a staggering 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain watching our every move.

But as victims of crime have found to their cost, catching criminals on camera is dependent on the equipment being both monitored and maintained.

BBC Inside Out's investigation has found that all too often Big Brother either isn’t watching, had a broken camera, lost the footage or just could not be bothered to go through the tapes.

The Kumars who run a shop in Plaistow, East London, have been the victims of crime over 200 times in the past decade.

Disappointingly, despite capturing the criminals on CCTV in their own shop and reporting the crimes, there have been just four convictions.

Chris Horton from Hammersmith sympathises. He was mugged in full view of 17 CCTV cameras yet, because none of them were working, his attacker got away scot-free.

In London, there are more CCTV cameras than any other city in the world with one camera for every eight Londoners.

In Islington, shop owner Richard Harris says that CCTV simply doesn't work: "As a deterrent I don't think it works because they never seem to get any prosecutions, even if you supply your own camerawork or your own pictures, they're not interested. You have to have a stabbing, a shooting or a robbery of a violent kind to get some sort of response."

Even within the Metropolitan Police itself, there are differences of opinion. One senior Met officer, Mick Neville, described London's CCTV network as an "utter fiasco", claiming it takes 1,000 cameras to solve just one crime per year.

But another senior Met officer disagrees. Detective Chief Inspector Julian Worker said "For me, it is the most useful tool amongst the armoury of investigative tools that the Metropolitan Police and other police services throughout the country use. We are probably market leaders in the way that we utilise CCTV."

One UK businessman thinks he's come up with a solution by recruiting volunteers to watch live CCTV footage streamed over the web in return for cash prizes.

Businessman Tony Morgan sees his company, Internet Eyes, as the future with an army of volunteer spies monitoring live CCTV footage online and alerting police to any criminal activity they witness.

He plans to use thousands of free recruits to bag criminals in the act.

Their only incentive is a monthly prize of £1,000 for the best crime spotter of the month yet over 10,000 recruits have already signed up.

Tony said: "People are frightened to report crime because if the curtain twitches will get a brick through the window. With Internet Eyes, no one knows who is watching - bit eye spy but helps fight crime."

But civil rights campaigners are not happy with the scheme.

Charles Farrier from No CCTV said: "Internet Eyes is a very worrying development - we are already the most watched country in the world. Now we have a private company asking private individuals to spy on each other."

Tony's scheme launches in early 2010 and is dependent on both volunteers sticking to their commitment to monitor the cameras and on police following up any leads that the volunteers alert them to.

Whilst it remains to be seen if the system will work in Britain, 4,000 miles away on the Texas/Mexico border, a similar scheme is already up and running.

Dan Reay of the Texas Virtual Border Watch thinks it could work in the UK. With over 52m hits on their website in just over a year, his system has already helped Border Patrol catch illegal immigrants in the act.

He said: "I would say, the citizens of London need to get involved and protect their city. The programme works but it only works with the total participation of the public."