La cité sous les 1000 yeux de Big Brother - Le Figaro. CCTV boom has failed to slash crime, say police. Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned.
Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe. The warning comes from the head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard as the force launches a series of initiatives to try to boost conviction rates using CCTV evidence. They include: · A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders. · Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month. · Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects.
"CCTV operators need feedback. Is the use of CCTV cameras in schools out of hand? Street graffiti by Banksy on a wall next to a CCTV camera in central London.
Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters Nick Pickles: 'Surveillance is used as a quick fix' Our research on CCTV cameras in schools estimates that there are now more than 100,000 CCTV cameras in secondary schools and academies across England, Scotland and Wales. Our concerns about the scale of their use are not only a matter of the privacy of school children and teachers, but are also over the reasons why Britain continues to race ahead of nearly every other country when it comes to surveillance.
All too often, surveillance is used as a quick fix, with little or no evaluation of whether it actually addresses the problem. It seems prudent to establish an evidential basis before pursuing such widespread surveillance, particularly given the heightened sensitivity of recording young people at school. Parents, teachers and pupils need to be part of the discussion. . • Nick Pickles is director of Big Brother Watch. Every step you take: UK underground centre that is spy capital of the world. Millions of people walk beneath the unblinking gaze of central London's surveillance cameras.
Most are oblivious that deep under the pavements along which they are walking, beneath restaurant kitchens and sewage drains, their digital image is gliding across a wall of plasma screens. Westminster council's CCTV control room, where a click and swivel of a joystick delivers panoramic views of any central London street, is seen by civil liberty campaigners as a symbol of the UK's surveillance society.
Using the latest remote technology, the cameras rotate 360 degrees, 365 days a year, providing a hi-tech version of what the 18th century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived as the "Panopticon" - a space where people can be constantly monitored but never know when they are being watched. So famed has central London's surveillance network become that figures released yesterday revealed that more than 6,000 officials from 30 countries have come to learn lessons from the centre.