# Transcript

JOHN.

So far this cassette has raised a number of issues about CCTV, it's used in crime control, it's used in the criminal courts, it's used by private companies, how far it's used should be regulated, and how much impact CCTV can be expected to make on the broad issue of the problem of crime.. We talked to Richard Sparks at the Department of Criminology at the University of Keele, about the benefits and dangers .. Richard, can we reasonably expect CCTV to have any impact on er levels of crime, can we have it expect it to have any impact on providing security for our lives?

RICHARD SPARKS .

Well this is a difficult one isn't it, I think we've already heard some recognition from all those who have spoken we've got to break down a little what we mean by the notion of crime here as any student of D315 will already be well aware. What I think this debate is reall about, so far, concerns certain kinds of public order problems which take place in public space. Thefts, criminal damage, routine public order problems, perhaps car crime in particular, and clearly those ar·e offences which concen1 people a great deal.. But another interesting facet of this is also concen1s how what model if you like we use to explain those events it seems to me that there's a fairly clear tie between the idea that CCTV can be especially useful in addressing those questions, and an implicit explanation of why they take place, what's broadly known these days as a rational choice model of offending. So that really the connection that's being addressed and I think Andrew Puddephat put this point rather well is a connection to a situational idea of criminal opportunity and reducing criminal opportunity rather than any broader understanding of causes of crime as they might formerly have been understood. Another question I suppose given the erm the focus on public space, is also the relative exclusion of attention to crimes that take place in private, and those are of quite different kinds we've heard references to crimes which occur within the family, but also there are numerous kinds of offence, including perhaps in particular crimes of business and crimes of the state which are designedly take place in very private places by people who have very often the social ability to exclude themselves fom other forms of supervision, or oversight regulation etc. Nobody really knows if you like what proportion of crime those kinds of events constitutes so by extension we can't really know what proportion of crime is being prevented.

JOHN.

So, CCTV is just directed at a small amount and a particular sort of crime, it's not really addressing itself to the broader range of the crime problem.

RICHARD.

Which is not to say that those crimes ar·e in any sense unimportant and they may often be the kinds of crnnes which impact fairly directly on people's sense of well being in using those public space. And one of the more interesting points I think we've heard, is that er the sense of being under proper supervision can in fact extend people's ability to use public space in that sense, positively enhance liberty by enabling people who might otherwise have felt excluded from doing so from being in public.

JOHN

There is a price to paid though for er that feedom to walk down a street, okay a camera's watching and you feel safer, er we couldn't talk about whether that's um degree of safety or a degree of fear is actually rational or not just because a camera is sitting there but I mean, the one issue that does er concern me and it's obviously a key theme of Andrew Puddephat's analysis, is what does this mean in broader terms? If we have er cameras on every street corner, we have cameras outside our homes, maybe one day we'll have cameras inside our homes, who's who's actually watching the video screen, is it just an example of us becoming a lot more tightly controlled and regulated, erm in Fucault's sense are we becoming a carceral society?

RICHARD.

I think it might be important to distinguish between being watched and being controlled however. If we think back to the kinds of things that Fucault was saying about the panoptic prison or the asylum or the factory, he was also talking about ways in which those institutions served minutely to regulate people's behaviour on a a continual basis, with the intention as it were of reconstructing their whole being or consciousness.. You could argue that some CCTV type technologies they're actually very behavioural all they're really concen1ed with is what we overtly do, they don't address themselves to the minutiae of our behaviour at all and, that's not to say they're either good or bad, but it is to say I think there's an historical difference between the ambitions of what was at stake, and maybe for the watchers today it is simply enough that we behave ourselves, within certain parameters.. They don't necessarily need to kind of feel the sense of contr'Ol over our very beings as well, perhaps that's all they require.

JOHN ..

So CCTV for you doesn't conjure up an image of er of some 1984 nightmare land or it needn't necessarily.

RICHARD.

Not necessarily but I think we have to be we have to be rather more careful than talking in kind of paranoid terms about nightmares and distopias .. It's in a way it's too important for that, what we have to recognise is that there is you know a really quite major historical development taking place, and we have to make some fairly basic political decisions I suppose, about how as a society we wish to respond to those developments. These technologies aTe not going to be disinvented, it tends to follow that we have to determine how and within what limits we want them used, and who benefits, and those are very much questions which bring them within the ambit of things that need to be decided at a collective and political level they're not as it were simply marginal adjuncts to social life which are peripheral I think they can reconstruct social life in a fairly fundamental way.

JOHN.

So isn't it then the case then that the the issue of crime is being used as the as the way in which these new technologies can be more and more brought into our everyday lives, so that we accept them we we're because we're lead to believe that they're useful in reducing criine.

RICHARD.

I think it's certainly true that developments which initially appear rather erm untoward and scary quite rapidly become normalised if you think how how quickly we've all become habituated to the idea of cameras on motorways for instance which only a few yeas ago were milieard of. Now, as it happens I think that some such uses of these technologies are fairly uncontroversial, and it's quite hard to find people who can produce a principled argument against the use of cameras on motorways for example.. But we we need to take care I think how much we allow ourselves to buy lock stock and barrel, the full implications of the technology because we happen to find some of its uses convenient. And er certainly not just in the case of CCTV but other forms of electronic monitoring, the encoding of smart identification cards, and so on and so forth, that these things have many uses sorne of thern have.become if you like the conditions of access to goods and services and practises fom which many of us derive considerable financial and personal and leisure benefits, but that we we allow ourselves to become unconscious of what what's implied in thei use somewhat at our peril, arguably.. I guess like any powerful tool, erm surveillance technologies are ambiguous in their effects and some of those effects are unforeseen and unintended, and that's why we need to encourage a fairly careful, active, participative public conversation about what we do and don't want to happen using them. I mean we may forget for exainple that policing itself, as a11 activity was once highly controversial, and yet it has become so rnuch part of the fabric of our everyday life that it no longer seems so to us. And maybe we're on the verge of a similar· kind of a transformation.

JOHN.

Maybe you me correct in seeing the end of the twentieth century as marking the moment of transformation, in future years we'll talk about it in the saine degree we talked about that moment of transformation at the end of the eighteenth century which saw the birth of the prison.. For now Richard, thanks a lot.