Global Security Challenge

London's CCTV Needs Facelift

cctv.jpg

Britain claims to be the country with the highest concentration of CCTV cameras, and certainly every time there is a big profile crime we are shown video footage of the victim and or perpetrators.  When a suspected terrorist was shot dead in a tube station,  the video was replayed hundreds of times on the news.  Yet even with the ever present surveillance cameras in London, only 3% of street robberies are solved using CCTV.  The Detective Chief Inspector of London's Met Police. Mick Neville calls it a 'fiasco.'

So why with this relatively simple and omnipresent technology, is it so infrequently used to solve crimes.  The answer is the human interface.  Officers don't like trawling through hours of video footage because it is time consuming, hard work.  As reported in the press and on blogs the Metropolitan Police thinks the problem lies not with the technology itself but how it is deployed; "Billions of pounds have been spent on kit [equipment] but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images..." 

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