10:39am Friday 3rd April 2009
HE public reaction to the use of CCTV varies. The majority accepts it in general terms as a good thing, if it is properly run within the restrictions imposed by the various Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts.
Some, however, fear the Big Brother implications and others suspect it simply doesn’t do what it says on the tin. I am a member of the Wycombe CCTV Lay Panel, which monitors the use of CCTV in our area on behalf of the public and can report that the panel is more than satisfied that our local operation is run scrupulously and the training and systems in place allow for no misuse of the cameras.
As far as effectiveness is concerned, studies confirm that publicly-operated CCTV is successful in reducing crimes against property, (particularly and dramatically, for instance, in public car parks) and other crimes that can be described as ‘premeditated’. For crimes of passion/impulse, the benefits of CCTV lie principally in the increased likelihood of detection – drunkenness and public disorder can be swiftly dealt with if picked up by cameras.
Others simply don’t believe that cameras are worth their cost. Recently a tree in Marlow was damaged and because the perpetrator(s) could not be identified from CCTV footage, some residents considered this as proof of the worthlessness of the system.
This is tantamount to saying that a police officer on the beat is ineffective if he fails to witness a crime being committed elsewhere on his patch.
Cameras can only see what they’re looking at, just like humans. Others say they’d rather have a ‘bobby on the beat’, not realising perhaps that the annual cost of a policeman (according to a 2005 Home Office study), would pay for an average of around 50 surveillance cameras.
We are very lucky in Wycombe and surrounding districts to have a CCTV system that is council run and operated, which means that the operators are accountable to us, the surveyed. At its recent annual public meeting, the Lay Panel reported that in the previous year, our local CCTV had been instrumental in 662 arrests and assisted the police on a further 4,827 occasions.
This does not include the assistance offered by the facility in locating missing persons or helping the public in a variety of non-crime related ways.
Since January 2001, when records were first kept, the total is 4,412 arrests.
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