- LONDON (UPI) - Big brother
is big business in the battle against crime in Britain, but photo-shy
villains
have developed a bag of new tricks to elude the gaze of thousands of
surveillance
cameras that now dot its cities, towns and villages.
-
- With 1.5 million closed-circuit television systems
watching
its streets, office buildings, schools, shopping centers and roads, Britain
is one of the most closely monitored nations on the planet, and the
government
is spending another $115 million for more TV eyes.
-
- But crime is soaring across the country. In London, a
city of 8 million people, murder is going on at a record pace. Street
robbery,
the very crime that CCTV is supposed to be best at deterring, will reach
50,000 this year.
-
- The problem, one exasperated police source told United
Press International, is that "the TV cameras can't be everywhere.
There are hundreds of thousands of nooks and crannies left, everywhere
you look, and this is where criminals are increasingly operating. And when
a camera shows up, they move elsewhere."
-
- Many of the villains are adapting. Some are targeting
luxury cars on the move so that any view a TV camera gets of them is
fleeting
at best. Others conceal their street muggings by grabbing their victims
in a clinch that, on CCTV, looks like nothing more than a romantic
hug.
-
- Police say criminals discouraged by the prospect of an
unwanted TV appearance in London or other cities take to commuting to the
countryside where prospective victims are more trusting and the pickings
are easier.
-
- "There is more security-consciousness now in urban
areas, which makes it less easy for the thief, than in the countryside
where, generally speaking, people have tended to be more lax," said
Nicholas Bond, a spokesman for NFU Mutual, an insurance company
specializing
in rural communities.
-
- "There is a feeling that opportunist crime is moving
out toward the rural areas," said Ian Fraser of CGNU, one of Britain's
largest household contents insurers.
-
- The British government is convinced that TV surveillance
will remain a major anti-crime weapon and recently announced that it is
financing the installation of more than 200 closed-circuit monitoring
systems,
from London to provincial cities and towns.
-
- "CCTV has repeatedly proved its effectiveness in
the fight against crime and the fear of crime," said John Denham,
a minister in the Home Office. "Knowing that there is an extra set
of eyes watching over their communities helps to reassure people that they
will be safe."
-
- Experts are convinced that more advanced technology is
making CCTV an even more valuable tool.
-
- In the city of Hull, for instance, a test project in
one crime-ridden area is based on a new, Internet-based CCTV system using
tiny cameras disguised in street lamps or concealed on buildings to
transmit
digital pictures to a monitoring center around the clock. Authorities said
an independent evaluation of the system showed that in the first five
months
of operation, car crime in the area was down 80 percent, shoplifting was
down 69 percent, robbery was down 68 percent, burglary was down 49 percent
and violent crime is down 30 percent.
-
- "As the system is digital," said project
manager
John Marshall, "there are no video tapes, and images are transferred
instantly from camera to computer, where the data can be transferred to
police stations by the Internet."
-
- Other local governments are interested in the idea, but
cost could become a major deterrent. The system in the Hull trial cost
an estimated $570,000 for protection of 3,200 residents.
-
- Meanwhile, other areas are reporting
less-than-spectacular
success with big brother technology. In London's Newham district, 300
cameras
are dotted around the central business area yet street robberies increased
by one-fifth in 2001 from the previous year, and car thefts climbed by
3.6 percent.
-
- "Although CCTV cameras might be useful within a
broadly based anti-crime strategy," said one specialist, "turning
the nation's city and town streets into seamless surveillance zones is
itself no substitute for proper policing."
-
- A three-year study commissioned by the British government
and conducted by the Scottish Center for Criminology suggested that
"spy"
cameras had little or no effect on crime. It concluded that
"reductions
were noted in certain categories, but there was no evidence to suggest
that the cameras had reduced crime overall."
-
- "The cameras appeared to have little effect on
clear-up
rates for crimes and offenses" the report said.
-
- The findings "have taken the stardust out of our
eyes about this new technology," said Jason Dittion, a criminologist
and the study's main author.
-
- CCTV's defenders point out that it was such technology
that recorded the abduction of 2-year-old James Bulger in a Liverpool
shopping
center by a pair of 10-year-old boys who later bludgeoned him to death.
The TV evidence was key to their arrest and conviction.
-
- At the other end of the scale, police forces across the
land are using surveillance cameras to "capture" and convict
thousands of speeders and other traffic violators -- and the local
government
in Merton, in south London, is using its 60 CCTV surveillance cameras to
zero in on litterbugs.
-
- The use of surveillance cameras in policing has, perhaps
inevitably, attracted frowns from civil liberties groups, who see them
as an infringement on individual rights.
-
- "I don't think anyone has really thought through
the implications of all this," said Simon Davies, of the civil rights
watchdog group Privacy International.
-
- "What tends to happen is you start penalizing
extreme
or unusual behavior, which leads to social exclusion," Davies said.
"And it won't be just criminals. A safer and more efficient Britain
is not necessarily a better society."
-
- The police see life under the camera's view somewhat
differently.
-
- "When cameras are properly targeted," said
Graeme Gerrard, a spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers,
"they can deter offenders, reduce the level of crime and increase
the feeling of safety for those using our public spaces."
-
- The surveillance camera as a public amenity is here to
stay, but the arguments about usefulness, legality and ethicality have
only just begun.
-
- Copyright © 2002 United Press International. All
rights reserved.
|
