Measure type: Surveillance

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Measure: surveillance

Surveillance is the monitoring of the behavior, activities, or other changing information, usually of people for the purpose of influencing, managing, directing, or protecting.[1]

Monitoring of traffic is a related activity which can be used for general traffic management or incident management.

Description

CCTV

Monitoring with the help of cameras (CCTV) has become a common method throughout all Europe to combat crime and terrorism. In the UK more than 4 million cameras have been installed (The Associated Press, 2007).

Essential conditions

Requirements to the urban environment

Effectiveness

CCTV

Effectiveness of CCTV:

  • Empirical research finds that the overall crime rates drop in the areas with CCTV, but not in all cases and situations. Furthermore, crimes committed in the heat of the momen, such as assaults are in general not affected by the presence of cameras.
  • Total costs of CCTV far exceed that of the camera hardware alone[2].
  • To be effective, surveillance systems should be fully integrated into law enforcement practices

Side effects

  • CCTV and the displacement effect

Situational crime prevention measures such as camera surveillance are subject of displacement effects. A UK-study (2009)[3] empirically tested this thesis in the UK on 13 CCTV projects and concludes that spatial displacement of crime due to camera surveillance does occur, but not in a frequent and uniform way across space and types of offences[4]

Footnotes and references

  1. wikipedia:Surveillance
  2. See e.g.:http://www.library.ca.gov/crb/08/08-007.pdf and http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/dec/22/cctv-surveillance-police-cost
  3. Waples, S., M. Gill, and P. Fisher (2009). Does CCTV displace crime? Sage Publications.
  4. Violence against persons, for example, increased dramatically, which (according to the authors) "could be explained by the increase in reporting due to the cameras or due to the national upward trend in recorded violent crime."

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