# Transcript

JOHN MUNCIE.

My name is John Muncie, Chair of the D315 Course Team, on this cassette we're going to be discussing issues related to technologies of crime control. In Chapters 4 and 5 of Book 2 we introduced the idea that punishment may not be simply about dealing with and disposing of convicted offenders, but is also about wider social regulation and processes of discipline. In Chapter 4 for example, in the early nineteenth century new kinds of institutions, the asylum, the workhouse, as well as the prison, were designed and built to promote social stability when traditional ideas and practices appeared outmoded. Innovations in prison design, such as Bentham's panopticon, were to instil values of obedience and compliance as well as to control prison populations through constant surveillance. Writers like Michel Fucault give an even broader understanding of institutional confinement. In the grand design of the industrial revolution it was not only the criminal who was incarcerated in the prison, but the lunatic in the asylum, the conscript in barracks, workers in factories, and children in schools. Fucault argued that the increase of such institutions amounted to an increasingly panoptic world or a carceral society. Means of control first developed in the prison, were adapted to non-penal and community settings. For Fucault such transformations herald a more tightly though less openly controlled society, in which all aspects of social life became subject to surveillance, official scrutiny, and discipline. In this cassette we'll be exploring whether such notions as panopticism, or the carceral society, have any bearing nowadays, in particular we focus on the controversies surounding the instillation, use, and regulation of closed circuit television cameras as a means of monitoring people's behaviour in shopping centres, in public thoroughfaes and on the roads. Now these are increasingly being used not just by the police, but also private security companies .. Are these technological innovations useful in controlling crime, if so at what cost to our own personal freedom and liberties? We talked to two police representatives fom Newcastle and Gwent, and to the General Secretary of the civil liberties pressure group Liberty. By the l 990's, one of the most ambitious police operated CCTV schemes was developed in Newcastle. Superintendent Bob Pattison explains.

SUPERINTENDENT BOB PATISON.

In enn Newcastle city centre we have a very large shopping complex and a large area of er licenced premises and restaurants .. We realized some years ago that that would was ideal for a overt CCTV system. There's a lot of er CCTV systems in the city centre already, inside shops, shopping malls, one or two nightclubs have little er systems on the doors. It seemed sensible to extend that for our use with relaying the pictures back to the police station, it could become part and parcel of our policing philosophy for the city centre. The traders in particular were very keen to support us, and we had excellent support from Newcastle City Com1cil, and the local authority, and indeed the government gave a grant through the local authority, to pay for fifty per cent of the cost The system is overt, we involved er the planning authorities of course, but also the media and held open meetings with different groups of businessmen, community forums, the local authority, we we told everybody what we were doing. There was a lot of support from both the people who come into town to work, those people who have businesses, and those people who come into town on an evening to socialise and drink, we were quite overwhelmed by the amount of support there was. We published the details in the press and in TV, of where the cameras would be, they are quite large in effect so they are quite readily visible, which I think is important for CCTV because the public should know what's happening.

JOHN.

Andrew Puddephat, the General Secretary of Liberty, takes a more sanguine view of public demand and public support for CCTV.

ANDREW.

There are currently about two hundred and twenty CCTV schemes in operation or planned up and down the country, and we're moving very rapidly to a point when most town centres will be covered by video surveillance of some kind. In some cases it's administered by tl1e police, in some cases by a local authority, in some cases this it's administered by private owners of one kind or another. And what's I think really extraordinary is that there's been this rush to using widespread video surveillance of the people of this country, without there being any authoratitive research that shows that video surveillance actually helps prevent to reduce levels of crime, there's some small studies but nothing definitive, and there is no statutory regulation whatsoever, so although it's been introduced apparently as nominally for crime control, there's no legal prohibition on other uses being made of video surveillance, such as the monitoring of people on demonstrations on consumer pickets trade union activity, or any of the other uses to which our streets might be put. So I think our first concern is not that video surveillance is being used per se because it it may have some benefits, but we're concerned at the absence of ground work being done to establish what the benefits are, and for that to be measured against the costs, and secondly the absence of statutory regulation which would prohibit video surveillance being abused by private or public interests.

JOHN

However for Bob Pattison the benefits of CCTV are quite clear.

BOB..

The system went live in 92 and since then, for instance assaults are down over eleven per cent Burglaries are down forty nine per cent. Robberies are down, and in fact every category of crime is down.. In the three years since 91, five thousand crimes less as I said earlier. The feel good factor, as described to us by the people who operate businesses in Newcastle, has risen at pace with the fall in crime. Trade is up, people are coming back into the city centre at night, not just young people out for a good time, but women, older people are coming back into the city centre. Of all the people arrested because of CCTV or where CCTV has been used in evidence and that number far exceed four hundred at the last count, only on two occasions have people pleaded not guilty. The Crown Prosecution Service inform us that the saving to the criminal justice system must run into many hundreds of thousands of pounds now, through CCTV, because the number of people pleading not guilty to their actions, they can still mitigate as to why perhaps a fight started, but it's very difficult to say it wasn't me who swung the first punch or I didn't kick him when he went down if it's there on tape. The number of elections for trial has much reduced, the number of guilty pleas has increased tremendously.

JOHN.

CCTV is praised not only as an effective crime control measure, but also as a cost effective means of dealing with offenders in court. It is also argued that the use of video evidence is tightly controlled. Richad Thomas a member of the Association of Chief Police Officers Crime Prevention sub committee, explains ..

RICHARD THOMAS.

Anything that's recorded on on video tape can be used in evidence, as long as the tape itself is protected, and that the credibility of the tape is is preserved. We would put in a system of of immediately taking that tape from the machine if there is evidence on it, and making a working copy of the tape, sealing the original tape up and making sure it's locked away and logged .. The working tape of course can then be shown if there is a defendant to the defendant, and his or her reaction to that tape can be to be gleaned or it can be actually taken into the investigating officer's possession and he could look at it and it may help him in the investigation of of the offence. There are no regulations as to who sees the tape the working copy, but investigators must always be aware, and I think again this is something that we're coming to terms with as technology overtakes the gathering of evidence or increases the gathering of evidence, and that is that you may well be asked in in court questions about who has actually viewed that tape, and you must always be in a position to say who's viewed it and for what reason. It's very important to show the defendant always in if he's er has a solicitor in the presence of his solicitor, the tape, and we do that when we're interviewing them, simply to er gain their reaction to the evidence that's available and they must know what the evidence is against them, but of course there's an implication there when most people see themselves committing an offence on tape, are much likelier to admit it or plead guilty before the court, that's saving a lot of court time and a lot of time and money for both the courts and and and police officers.

JOHN.

In a similar way Andrew Puddephat acknowledges the potential benefits in terms of crime control but the issue of how and where it is used is still contestable.

ANDREW.

I'm not opposed to video surveillance per se, and if there's evidence that it does actually put off people from carrying out violent acts hooliganism, or theft then I'm very happy to support that, obviously anybody would be. But I would like to see the use of video surveillance restricted to those activities, and if that's what we're using it for, fine, let us simply say in law, that is all it can be used for, and let's have the safeguard that it can't be used for any other purpose, it can't be used to film teenagers who are hanging around in a shopping cente, because they've got nowhere else to go, and that infonnation being recorded on a police file, or a private security firms file, even though they've done nothing wrong. And I'm particularly concen1ed about the growth of private security firms and their own video surveillance. I said there were two hundred and twenty local authority schemes in operation throughout the country in shopping centres, but there's something like a hundred and fifty thousand surveillance cameras in operation in different parts of the country and a vast majority are in private hands, in the hands of private individuals and private companies who use them for their own purposes. Now what I'm saying is when this technology's developing as fast as it is, and the level of film er is reaching a quite a high degree of sophistication if you pay the right money, I think it should be subject to controls and not be allowed to just happen willy nilly.