a study of London's widespread use of CCTV cameras, found that for every
1,000 cameras installed, only one crime has been solved. On top of that,
when faced with a crime, the CCTV cameras are rarely that useful. The report
found that CCTV cameras were used to catch just 8 out of 269 suspected
robbers.
This is without mentioning the privacy aspects; I find it rather worrying how people seem to accept constant surveillance so easily.
Britain has been doing the experiment for you and is generally regarded as the most surveilled western society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#United_Kingdo...
Sensationalist article by the Daily Mail:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205607/Shock-figure...
Some articles on the resulting (in)effectiveness of having the cameras:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6082530/1000-CC...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/6083476/CC...
http://www.library.ca.gov/CRB/97/05/crb97-005.pdf (Warning: PDF)
How many journalists do you think even have a rigorous enough understanding of statistics to even begin to be able to answer these sort of questions ?
Do you think before this data came out that the Telegraph or Daily Mail were pro-CCTV ? - or do you think that they'd already decided their position long before and were just looking for whatever data would back them up ?
The wikipedia page sites sources. The Daily Mail article I described as a "sensationalist article". The first Telegraph article cites its source of data. The second Telegraph is a commentary piece with 106 comments from people giving a sampling of opinion with "comment" in the URL. And the final report is from the California State Library and shows its working.
Better more rigourous sources would be nicer but we at least already have some that aren't particularly promising which seems counter intuitive. CCTV also comes at a huge cost, paid for by tax payers and hence determined by voters.
Clearly this didn't happen in this case. Why did Telegraph chose to use this particular metric ("crimes solved using CCTV") rather than for instance "crime rate change as a result of CCTV" (which would take into account deterrence). Why did they choose to use total number of CCTV cameras rather than the number of active CCTV cameras ?
One of the points of peer review is spot biases like this.
I'm not saying that CCTV works (or that it doesn't) but newspapers or non-peer reviewed research often falls far below an acceptable standard for evidence.
Perhaps helping to create a society that is more personally fulfilling and with a greater degree of social equality and fairness might be a good place to focus.
So everything from free local arts/education/tech facilities through to high quality affordable group legal insurance.
and another darker vision: "For if you [the rulers] suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves [outlaws] and then punish them." Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Utopia, Book 1
Here's an idea for a frighteningly ambitions startup: Kill the prison-industrial complex! How? Fight crime! It costs a lot of taxpayer money and social wealth to keep things the way they are. Ostensibly the goal is to keep people safe from criminals and reduce crime opportunities.
A friend of mine was mugged on the street for his iPhone last night. He was stabbed in the leg when he fought back (mistake but he's ok thankfully). I wonder if a few high-res web-cams on the street would have kept the attackers at bay?
How about a Peer-to-Peer police/surveillance state? Found these startup ideas tonight:
idea: turn my webcam into a security cam [1] http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-turn-my-webcam-into-a-s...
idea: millions of sensors / millions of surveys [2] http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-millions-of-sensors-mil...