cameras led to the identification and
apprehension of the four men who
carried out the failed 7/21 “copycat”
bombing attempts in 2005.
The still images from these cases
(see Figure 2a/b) have become iconic—
visual proof that CCTV works. Those
who questioned its value in the public debate, and dared to mention the
“p-word”—were largely dismissed as
“privacy cranks,” out of touch with the
needs of policing and the wishes of ordinary citizens. But over the past two
years, new doubts have been raised
over the benefits:
Photo coLLagE baSED oN a PhotograPh by toM PagE
In summer 2008, a report by Lon- ˲
don police concluded that CCTV contributed to solving about 3% of street
crimes. About £500 million ($700 million) has been spent on publicly funded CCTV in Greater London.
In August 2009, a senior officer in ˲
the London police stated that, on an
annual basis, about one crime was re-
solved for every 1,000 cameras in oper-
ation. He warned “police must do more
to head off a crisis in public confidence
over the use of surveillance cameras.”
In September 2009, John Bromley- ˲
Davenport, a leading criminal lawyer
in Manchester, said images from CCTV
did not prevent crime or help bring
criminals to justice. 3 He prosecuted
the killers of a man kicked to death outside a pub. The incident was recorded
on CCTV, but police officers did not
arrive in time to stop the attack, plus
the quality of the recorded footage was
too low to be used for identification
purposes in court. (The killers were
convicted on eyewitness evidence.) The
chief executive of a company that helps
police analyze CCTV footage estimated
“that about half of the CCTV cameras in
the country are next to useless when it
comes to safeguarding the public against
crime and assisting the police to secure
convictions.” Bromley-Davenport said
that large amounts of money spent
on technology meant less money was
available to have police officers on the
street—and that police presence was
what mattered for preventing crime.
In October 2009, design college ˲
professor Mike Press called for a mora-
torium on further CCTV deployments
in Scotland, because the technology
was “costly and futile […] a lazy approach
to crime prevention” that was dangerous
because it created “a false sense of secu-
rity, encouraging [citizens] to be careless
with property and personal safety.” 6
