1 The purpose, efficacy and regulation of CCTV

The Open University — Sun, 03 Apr 2016 23:00:00 GMT

John Muncie presents a series of opposing views about the purpose, efficacy and regulation of CCTV. The audio programme was recorded in 1994.

Participants in the audio programme were:

John Muncie Professor of Criminology at The Open University;
Bob Patison Superintendent with the Newcastle Police force;
Andrew Puddephat General Secretary of Liberty (civil rights organisation);
Richard Thomas Member of the Association of Chief Police Officers crime prevention sub committee;
Richard Sparks Professor of Criminology at the University of Keele and now Professor of Criminology at the University of Edinburgh.

Activity 1

Before listening to the audio programme it would be worth your while making some notes on your own views on new technological developments in crime control. As you do so, think about the following questions:

Do CCTV cameras have a presence in your neighbourhood?
Are you aware of these cameras and other forms of surveillance in your everyday life?
Do you think the new technologies control crime, or control us?
Why do you think that UK has the heaviest concentration of surveillance cameras ion the world?

These are some of the questions that are currently preoccupying criminologists, especially those involved in ‘situational crime prevention’ initiatives and ‘governance’ theorists.

Listen to the audio files. You may find it helpful to listen to the recordings a second time and take notes.

The technology crime control part 1 (11 minutes 5 MB)

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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.

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JOHN.

Andrew Puddephat notes how the British government has been reluctant to impose statutory regulations.

ANDREW.

The Council of Europe agreed a regulation in 1987 which was meant to control all forms of electronic surveillance equipment used by police forces throughout Europe, and essentially it's said that every form of electronic surveillance equipment should be the subject of statutory regulation by Parliament, our government wouldn't go along with that, said it wasn't prepaed to comply with that provision. Now until our government's prepared to give those guarantees, that it's not prepaed to collect that information and store it, people walking up and down this country have got a lot to be afraid of in terms of who's filming them, what the purpose of that film is for, and who's keeping that information, I think we're right to be concerned and the people of this country are right to be concerned about the unregulated growth of video surveillance.

JOHN.

And both Bob Pattison and Richard Thomas feel that whilst the polices use of CCTV is perfectly satisfactory, there may still be some legitimate concerns about its uncontrolled use by private operators ..

BOB.

Our concern is where CCTV is monitored by perhaps security companies who aren't able to vet the stuff, perhaps are er filmed by the owner of the building, and and maybe it captures members of the public doing things which were not legal or perhaps unsavoury or or they would be worried about otl1er people seeing, there is a concern fom some of us that CCTV will be used by people like Special Branch. Our system is not, it's an overt system in any case, so the people know if the cameras ae looking at them which is a major safeguard for the public, but the system is not used by Special Branch.. We discussed this with Special Branch during the the planning stages, and we made it known we would not welcome any approach for the cameras, they have not made any approach.. I think they're the best way I can put it it's a gentlemen's agreement, and I think the police officers who are in Special Branch recognise the benefits to society as a whole in in CCTV being used as both a crime reduction tool and erm an ev evidence gathering system for criminal cases, such as burglaries and assaults, er is such that it isn't worth jeopardising it for something else.

RICHARD.

I understand the thinking of these civil liberties groups and and the people who worry about this and that is this, if the police set out to survey you or me, or to survey a certain area to look specifically for something and then we have to have a level of authorisation usually at chief officer level to say we can do it. If a supermarket wants to have that level of surveillance on its staff or on you and I shopping in there there's no check on that Technology will never get rid of crime, I think we'd be particularly naive and we would be undervaluing the criminal society in this country if we thought we were gonna beat them with technology, however we can make it more difficult for them, we can make them work harder for their money, and I think technology does that I think technology has helped in house burglary, it could possibly help more, there are areas you could move into I mean you could have a video camera inside and outside your house. Whether you want to go to those lengths I suspect it would assist you. Violent crime is in families, so technology's not gonna help that. So, I think in the long term yes it w it can help prevent, it can help detect, does help detect, it will never eradicate crime but it may reduce it in certain areas to acceptable levels.

JOHN.

Bob Pattison also acknowledges that despite the benefits for policing and control of some crime, the wider implications of the new technologies do pose a dilemma for society.

BOB.

If I had CCTV on a lamp post outside my house, and when I went to bed at night I knew the police and I say the police, were monitoring my garden, the car parked on my drive, then I would sleep that much more soundly, cos I know the chances of the house being burgled or the car being stolen are much reduced. And if it does happen, hopefully the evidence is there to support the prosecution.. If that camera though the following afternoon, is watching me as I cut the lawn, or if I'm having a drink or a barbeque in the garden with friends, then I would feel very uncomfortable, and that really is is the dilemma for society. There's one or two areas unfortunately in this force, where the public are asking for CCTV in their street I think that's more measure of the quality of their life than the appropriateness of CCTV. If the lesser of two evils is to lose some of that privacy, by having a police monitored CCTV scheme looking towards your house or into your garden, is less than the fear of being the victim of a burglary or a theft or an assault, then it's dmm1 shame.

JOHN

Andrew Puddephat goes furthur, and argues that the use of CCTV is not really about controlling crime at all. It does not tackle all crime, and has no relevance for addressing the cause of crime.

ANDREW.

In America they're now spending more money on prisons than they're spending on public education, and they're locked up over one million of their own citizens, and young black men in America have something like a one in three chance of going to prison some time in their life now, this is where we're heading unless we step back and say that real security isn't gonna be provided by cameras, probably isn't going to be provided by actually more policemen on the streets because you'll never have enough policemen to police every comer. It's gonna be provided by changing the underlying conditions of society that give rise to the kinds of crime that we've all we've all got good reason to fear. W we're never gonna have a position where you're going to have blanket video surveillance, because it's far too expensive. So video surveillance will always be selective, and it's likely to concentrate on the principal thoroughfares and high streets, the areas where the big shops are, because the the large stores put the pressure on. Video surveillance is not gonna be up the side streets where the muggings and the robberies and the violence takes place, so we need to be clear about that it is not the solution to those kinds of crime. It is a response to the desire to create spaces which are monitored, controlled, and regulated, which although they may be public spaces in the sense that the public has access to them, they take on an increasingly private character. The problem with the crime debate in this com1try and the way we're tackling crime policy, is it's not being looked at essentially on a rational basis, we're not looking at the causes of crime seriously, we're not addressing why crime's gone up two and half times since 1980 as it has done.. We're not looking at why crime rates rise and fall, we're not looking at the difference between crimes of violence, the patterns within crimes of violence, and the patterns between crimes of theft. We don't look at who commits crime, in fact it's committed by young men between the ages of sixteen to twenty four, and it's clearly something's bad going badly wrong in our education system that's that's producing people who are increasingly taking to the streets. We're not addressing the culture of personal acquisitiveness, and the way that personal worth is increasingly measured by how many consumer goods you've got. We're not addressing a number of factors which give rise to crime which is probably the most complex of all social phenomena. Instead we're relying on a very crude approach, a a sort of a preventative market approach based on surveillance equipment and burglar alanns and so on, which is fuelled and encouraged by the private sector, because there is a lot of money being made in this.

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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.

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Introduction

Learning outcomes

1 The purpose, efficacy and regulation of CCTV

Activity 1

Transcript: The technology crime control part 1

Transcript: The technology crime control part 2

Transcript: The technology crime control part 3

Conclusion

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Acknowledgements