Surveillance

Proving the value of CCTV

By Amelia Kwok | 21 May 2008

Does CCTV suppress crime or displace it? As metropolitan CCTV systems become more commonplace, we look at the factors affecting the impact of surveillance investment – and ask users to identify the returns they have achieved from their expanding CCTV infrastructure.

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CCTV cameras deployed at public areas like the airports or even the streets have long come under fire for not fulfilling its crime- fighting purpose. Yet, in the past decade, the use of CCTV has grown to unprecedented levels while the debate on its ROI continues.

These cameras do little to prevent crime and are only able to detect crime at the most, according to a,Home Office study of Britain’s 4.2 million CCTV cameras. The study also revealed that more than eight out of 10 cameras do not provide satisfactory images for the police officers to use or analyse.

In the UK, government spending on CCTV is three-quarter of the total budget for crime prevention. So far, approximately 200 million pounds have been spent on four million CCTV cameras across the country, says Information Commissioner Richard Thomas in the UK. Despite this, there are still plans to purchase and install more cameras.

Liberal Democrat politician Dee Doocey, who sits on the LondonAssembly which determines transport and policing policy for London’s 32 borough and city, the stated area has over 10,000 publicly funded CCTV cameras but only one in five crimes are solved.

“Our figures show that there is no link between a high number of CCTV cameras and a better crime clear-up rate,” says Doocey.

The same sentiments were echoed by Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville who heads the Metropolitan Police’s Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido). “Only three per cent of crimes have been solved using CCTV footage and offenders aren’t afraid of being caught on video.”

Similarly, in San Francisco, the 68 government-funded surveillance cameras installed at notorious areas in the city with high crime rates have been cited as a failure. The cameras have not performed well, thus failing to provide crucial evidence for arresting wrongdoers. Since 2005, US$900,000 has been spent on the cameras, according to Mayor Gavin Newsom, who operates the CCTV programme.

Since the project commenced almost three years ago, it has assisted in only one arrest even though the homicide rates were at a 12-year high in 2007. Apparently, some devices are producing unclear and disjointed images, instead of the sharp quality and seamless streaming that they are capable of producing. The poor image quality is preventing the police from using surveillance tapes as evidence admissible in court.

While Britain is clearly the lead nation in implementing CCTV, other countries are quickly following. North America, Australia and some European countries are installing the cameras in urban environments which a few years ago would most likely have rejected the technology.

In 2004, the Melbourne City Council had the intention of abandoning its 23 security cameras after councilors observed that the cameras had failed in their mission of preventing crime. The Greens councilor in Australia David Risstrom had criticised the system as costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. However, the decision was abolished in the final voting process and the City of Melbourne’s Safe City Cameras Programme was allowed to continue. In late February 2008, the council approved a plan to deploy an additional 29 cameras as part of the programme to ensure the safety of citizens at night.

What are cameras good for?

The public has been misled into believing that installing camera systems would have a big impact on anti-social behaviour, says Graeme Gerrard, deputy chief constable of the Cheshire constabulary in the UK.

Neville adds, “Billions of pounds have been spent, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It’s been an utter fiasco. Why don’t people fear it? They think the cameras are not working.”

Gerrard and other experts share their insights, including:

Know that cameras don’t scare everyone “They have got to be thinking about the consequences. It is very effective in places like car parks, where offenders are going out to break into cars, and are thinking rationally. In terms of town centres, where a lot of the action is violent behaviour, often fuelled by alcohol, people aren’t thinking rationally. CCTV is the last thing they are thinking about. Even the presence of police officers does not deter the disorder on the street, so cameras are unlikely to stop them,” says Gerrard.

Untrained officers shouldn’t be asked to watch CCTV footage More training is needed for officers, says Neville. Often, they do not want to bother themselves with locating specific CCTV images “because it is hard work.” Sometimes the police do not bother inquiring beyond local councils to find out whether CCTV cameras monitored a particular street incident, he says.

There’s no one-size-fits-all CCTV A report, compiled by the Home Office and Association of Chief Constables, has revealed that very few cameras are positioned to correctly target terrorism. Cameras originally installed for detecting crime has also been used to record vehicle number plates of motorists to fulfill a dual-purpose according to the report and conflicting tasks entering bus lanes. They do not have the capability to perform well and crucial evidence fails in arresting wrongdoers.

Don’t skimp on video quality if you need it One of the reasons that captured images are unable to offer conclusive evidence in court have been attributed to low frame rate, or the number of images produced per second. When prosecutors and defence attorneys reviewed footage for a robbery case in the Mission District in San Francisco in August 2007, what was produced was a series of pictures with a distinct lag time, instead of a smooth-flowing video.

San Francisco CCTV cameras have a two to four frame rate per second. In contrast, movies and television programmes are telecast at a frame rate of 24 frames and above per second; Las Vegas casinos are mandated by regulators to film gaming areas at 30 frames per second. This is also the frame rate generated by more than 550 cameras installed and maintained by the city of Chicago, which has one of the nation’s most successful street surveillance programmes. However, the police are not allowed to watch the videos in real-time, nor shift the position of the cameras, due to privacy issues. The effects of such restrictions are investigated in an upcoming city report.

Manage public expectations “Most of the pressure comes from the public. Some of them may get disappointed when the CCTV goes in that actually… it does not deter most crime. I think they are perhaps misled in terms of the amount of crime that CCTV might prevent,” says Gerrard.

The CCTV network in the UK has been built up in a piecemeal way, driven by local authorities and the private sector more than by the police. “Better training and more intelligent use of the technology are important to the future development of how we use CCTV,” says Gerrard.

It is important to emphasise that the performance problems in any surveillance system are not a question of expensive, high-quality cameras versus inexpensive, low-quality cameras, says Gerrit Hurenkamp, Director of Regional Support at security firm Pelco.

There are a few core elements that must be considered – bandwidth demands, networking monitoring of all operative aspects of the system and most importantly, the reason in implementing the cameras, says Hurenkamp.