"Security" cameras
Is there a direct coorelation between the number of security cameras and the crime rate? It's not what you would think in England.
Theodore Dalrymple writes at the excellent
City Journal:
Cameras, Crooks, and Deterrence
Constant surveillance seems to have had little effect on Britain’s sky-high crime.
After the North Koreans, the British are probably the most highly surveyed people in the world. Around 10,000 publicly funded closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras—to say nothing of the private ones—watch London every day. The average Briton, you often hear, winds up photographed 300 times a day as he goes about his business, even if his business is crime.
Whenever a brutal murder is committed in a public place, the police announce that they are examining the video evidence: no such murder ever seems to occur off camera. Yet the number of CCTV cameras in place seems to have no effect on the number of crimes solved—the police in the London boroughs with many cameras, for instance, clear up no larger a proportion of crimes than those in boroughs with few.
A recent study demonstrating this failure to improve the clear-up rate, however, could not also show that the cameras failed to deter crime in the first place. Common sense suggests that they should deter, but common sense might be wrong. For if the punishment of detected crime is insufficient to deter, there is no reason why the presence of cameras should deter.
Lot's more at City Journal -- a very thoughtful essay.
Posted by DaveH at October 17, 2007 2:18 PM