‘Billions of pounds spent on Britain’s 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras has not had a significant impact on crime, according to the senior police officer piloting a new database.
Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said it was a “fiasco” that only 3 per cent of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV.’
This is taken from an article on the Times website, found here.
So a police chief admits CCTVs do not cut crime? Kudos to the chief for standing up and admitting cameras in our streets are not stopping crime. Footage taken from CCTV cameras in the UK, used in courts as evidence, are very poor. Britain has the most CCTV cameras than anywhere else in Europe. The total number of these cameras in the UK is 4,200,000 – one for every 14 people. And they’re not cheap. Billions of tax-payers money is going into a surveillence system that invades people’s privacy and, according to many, does not effectively a) prevent crime and b) provide accurate and clear evidence in courts.
So why are we still being closely monitored by our government? Why do they still spend so much money on these cameras if we still have high crime rates, which the cameras evidently aren’t solving? Every day we hear about another murder, and were the cameras able to prevent that? Were they even able to identify the killer? More often than not, the answer is no.
Cameras are another insidious erosion of our civil liberties – the Big Brother state. We’re practically living in Orwell’s 1984. Up to 90 percent of these cameras are illegal anyway, as they breach the Data Protection act.
I don’t want to appear some form of conspiracy nut, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that the purpose of cameras is not to prevent or solve crime cases, but to spy on us and remind us who’s in control.
Do they forget that the ones they are targeting are clever enough to wear a simple hoodie? In which case, the £15 hoodies are defeating the £500 cameras.
Although I’m sure the government will attempt to solve this problem by installing more cameras…
