UK: Billions of Pounds Wasted on Surveillance Cameras, Senior Cop Calls Program “Utter Fiasco”
May 6th, 2008Via: Times Online:
Billions of pounds spent on Britain’s 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras has not had a significant impact on crime, according to the senior police officer piloting a new database.
Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said it was a “fiasco” that only 3 per cent of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV.
Mr Neville, who heads the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) unit, told the Security Document World Conference that the use of CCTV images as evidence in court has been very poor.
“Billions of pounds have been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court,” he told the conference.
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“It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3 per cent of crimes were solved by CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.”
The aim of the Viido unit is to improve the way that CCTV footage is processed, turning it into a third forensic specialism alongside DNA analysis and fingerprinting.
Britain has more CCTV cameras than any other country in Europe.
