Re: Useless crime enforcement
CCTV has several major problems.
- You can't watch every camera 24 hours a day without there being a person there watching each one 24 hours a day.
- If you happen to see a crime in progress (which may take you several minutes to realise even in the obvious cases), actually doing anything about it is several more minutes away.
- If you have historical footage of a crime... great. Now what? "He was a short man in a hoodie". In London. Good luck tracing that guy without thousands of cameras all over every road in London (which, despite US media propaganda, we just don't have)
Working in IT for schools means that I'm responsible for the CCTV on large sites - 50+ cameras on many of them.
Allow me to summarise the numbers:
Percentage of incidents actually in progress that we witnessed live: 0%
Percentage of crimes that occurred where we could see anything on the CCTV: 1%
Percentage of crimes that we had footage of, but in which not one identifying feature was present: 99.9%
Percentage of crimes that we had full HD footage, showing faces, of which resulted in any convictions whatsoever: 0%.
In fact, over the last 20 years let me summarise every "success" of the CCTV:
A "kid" (18yo) started a fight in a corridor with another pupil. A supply teacher, who hadn't worked in the school before, stepped in and gently pushed - with the palm of his hand - the kid who had started the fight back against the corridor wall (no injury, nothing fast or hard, just a literal "Hey, hey, hey... no.."). The parents complained. He was struck off the teaching register while police investigated an allegation of assault against him.
It's the one, single, solitary time when I've had to provide actual evidence via the CCTV.
Now consider that my systems have "caught" three burglaries, multiple intruders, deliberate vandalism of fire doors which could have endangered life (by a disgruntled local man running for councillor, no less), and all kinds of assaults, breakages, thefts, etc. on camera.
Then multiply those percentages above to work out what else *did* go on but we didn't actually have *anything at all* from the CCTV.
CCTV is there for monitoring and peace of mind. I can see my house from work. I'm the only person who actually cares if my house is broken into. The neighbours will complain loudly about any alarm going off, while simultaneously ignoring it, so they are pointless. But with CCTV I can *see* if someone's jumping / jumped my fence and report a crime in progress. Despite being in control of dozens of cameras for work... I can't just sit and watch them all day. And even if we pull up an incident it usually contains nothing of interest at all (everything from "so-and-so pushed me in the playground" to "what time did John go home" to "we heard noises outside last night").
Don't expect cameras to do *anything* at all. They are defeated by the simple precept of "wear generic plain-coloured clothing, preferably a hoodie to cover your face". And, in fact, most of the time you can commit a crime right in view of a camera perfectly well without getting anything worthy of evidence at all (e.g. supermarket thefts - how do you think a camera high up can tell if one person put an extra bit of cheese in their bag in the middle of a crowded superstore?).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
