Britain is apparently best at cctv which is nice... But a spat that's been played out in the pages of York's local paper has suggested the council may have spent lots of money installing cameras, but that doesn't mean anyone's actually watching them.
There are tales of people contacting the police for help when a bike's stolen only to be told there's no useful footage. So just what do the cameras do for us?
Today I visited a CCTV control room. It was very impressive, and a useful part of that town's efforts to make public spaces better and safer. But the chap I spoke to set off my Freakonomics alarm bells.
I'm paraphrasing but he said something like "over the past 15 years crime has fallen because of these cameras". While that may be true, how does he know?
Crime and anti-social behaviour has improved in this town centre over the last 15 years but is that because of the cameras or something else? Have the trouble hot spots just moved to somewhere away from the cameras?
This used to be a mining area so maybe over the past 15 years the legacy of closing the pits and the resulting unemployment is slowly starting to subside.
Basically I don't know, but I suspect nobody else does either. So let's continue to treat claims like this with caution and not confuse correlation with causality.
That City of York council might not be thorough in monitoring their cameras doesn't concern me unduly. Could it be that across the country the justification for installing them have subsided for quite different reasons and the cameras end up watching the traffic mostly.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
No comments:
Post a Comment