What’s Next?

I personally doubt the effectiveness of CCTV, but I don’t think this story proves it either way.

“Our figures show that there is no link between a high number of CCTV cameras and a better crime clear-up rate,” she said. “Boroughs with thousands of CCTV cameras are no better at doing so than those which have a few dozen.”

Proponents of CCTV’s usefulness usually focus on its role in preventing crime, rather than solving it. But although the cameras across London’s public transport system allowed police officers to identify within a few days those responsible for the July 7, 2005, tube-train bombings in the city, the cameras did nothing to prevent the attack.

This is just hopelessly confused. Hypothetically, CCTV can reduce crime by ensuring identification after the fact or by preventing it in the first place. The first stat tells us that it is not useful at catching criminals afterwards but tells us nothing about the absolute crime rate in low and high CCTV saturated areas. It wouldn’t matter if the clean-up rate was the same if there was far less crime near the cameras. This is utterly useless for telling us if CCTV works or not.

And really, the best example of the system failing to prevent crime is the July bombers? I assume that the kind of people who CCTV would deter are those who don’t want to be seen, these people were planning to blow themselves up and were carrying as many different forms of ID as possible so people would know who they were afterwards. They WANTED to be seen, cameras were not a disincentive in this rare case. And they were able to identify them after! This is a bad example in every possible way to the point of the paragraph before.

I’m willing to be convinced but you’ll need to try harder than this guys.