It's what skeptics have suspected all along, and now it's official: Cameras don't catch crooks. Detective Chief Inspector Mike Neville, head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office of Scotland Yard, told a conference in London, England, this week that the project of plastering the city with closed-circuit TV cameras (CCTV) has been "a fiasco."
"CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure," said Insp. Neville. "It's been an utter fiasco: Only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There's no fear of CCTV. Why don't people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working."
And, by and large, those people are right. The picture quality on cameras often is not good enough to pass evidentiary muster in court, and investigators are often reluctant to slog through hours of footage to secure a conviction in the case of petty crimes.
In terrorism cases and several high-profile murders, London's ubiquitous CCTV cameras have played a key role in reconstructing what happened -- after the fact. But they have done little to stem the street violence that has become a part of the city's image along with the cameras themselves.
The lesson for other cities is "Don't imitate London." This is of particular interest to those who patrol the one Canadian city that faces security challenges on anything remotely like London's scale. The Toronto Police Service is in the midst of experimenting with the use of CCTV in some neighbourhoods, and the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) will soon complete installation of an $18-million camera system that will capture every one of the TTC's 2.5 million daily users on video.
Canada, fortunately, has activist, arm's-length privacy officials that should and probably will demand solid evidence of benefit every step of the way. The general public should adopt the same skeptical spirit. Above all, no CCTV camera should ever be purchased without someone asking whether the money could contribute more to public safety if it were spent somewhere else.
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