Surveillance Britain

It seems the CCTV chickens have come home to roost in surveillance obsessed Britain as a senior police officer has rubbished the impact of CCTV on crime prevention, a not too minor criticism in a country which is estimated to spend in excess of £1.1 Billon annually on installing and running CCTV systems making the inhabitants of Britain the most observed people in the world, to little practical effect it seems.

Billions of pounds spent on Britain’s 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras has not had a significant impact on crime, according to the senior police officer piloting a new database. Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said it was a “fiasco” that only 3 per cent of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV. Mr Neville, who heads the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) unit, told the Security Document World Conference that the use of CCTV images as evidence in court has been very poor.

“Billions of pounds have been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court,” he told the conference. “It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3 per cent of crimes were solved by CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.”

The aim of the Viido unit is to improve the way that CCTV footage is processed, turning it into a third forensic specialism alongside DNA analysis and fingerprinting. Britain has more CCTV cameras than any other country in Europe. But Mr Neville is reported in The Guardian as saying that more training was needed for officers who often avoided trawling through CCTV images “because it’s hard work”.


Viido had launched a series of initiatives including a new database of images that will be used to track and identify offenders using software developed for the advertising industry. This works by following distinctive brand logos on the clothing of unidentified suspects. By backtracking through images officers have often found earlier pictures of suspects where they have not been hiding their features. Mr Neville said that Viido would be publishing pictures of suspects in mugging, rape and robbery cases on the internet from next month and building a national CCTV database that will hold images of convicted criminals and unidentified suspects.

Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, said: “We would expect adequate safeguards to be put in place to ensure the images are used only for crime detection purposes, stored securely and that access to images is restricted to authorised individuals. We would have concerns if CCTV images of individuals going about their daily lives were retained.”

Fears that the UK would "sleep-walk into a surveillance society" have become a reality, the government's information commissioner has said. As always in Britain with Government projects delivery has been somewhat late but the “Big Brother” Society predicted by George Orwell in 1984 has certainly arrived now in 2008! Richard Thomas, who said he raised concerns two years ago, spoke after research found people's actions were increasingly being monitored. Researchers highlight "dataveillance", the use of credit card, mobile phone and loyalty card information, and CCTV. Monitoring of work rates, travel and telecommunications is also rising.

There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain - about one for every 14 people. But surveillance ranges from US security agencies monitoring telecommunications traffic passing through Britain, to key stroke information used to gauge work rates and GPS information tracking company vehicles, the Report on the Surveillance Society says. It predicts that by 2016 shoppers could be scanned as they enter stores, schools could bring in cards allowing parents to monitor what their children eat, and jobs may be refused to applicants who are seen as a health risk.

Produced by a group of academics called the Surveillance Studies Network, the report was presented to the 28th International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners' Conference in London, hosted by the Information Commissioner's Office. The office is an independent body established to promote access to official data and to protect personal details. The report's co-writer Dr David Murakami-Wood told BBC News that, compared to other industrialised Western states, the UK was "the most surveilled country". "We have more CCTV cameras and we have looser laws on privacy and data protection," he said. "We really do have a society which is premised both on state secrecy and the state not giving up its supposed right to keep information under control while, at the same time, wanting to know as much as it can about us."

The report coincides with the publication by the human rights group Privacy International of figures that suggest Britain is the worst Western democracy at protecting individual privacy. The two worst countries in the 36-nation survey are Malaysia and China, and Britain is one of the bottom five with "endemic surveillance". Mr Thomas called for a debate about the risks if information gathered is wrong or falls into the wrong hands. The Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) said there needed to be a balance between sharing information responsibly and respecting the citizen's rights. A spokesman said: "Massive social and technological advances have occurred in the last few decades and will continue in the years to come. "We must rise to the challenges and seize the opportunities it provides for individual citizens and society as a whole."



Graham Gerrard from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) said there were safeguards against the abuse of surveillance by officers. "The police use of surveillance is probably the most regulated of any group in society," he told the BBC. "Richard Thomas was particularly concerned about unseen, uncontrolled or excessive surveillance. Well, any of the police surveillance that is unseen is in fact controlled and has to be proportionate otherwise it would never get authorised”

Some of the myriad ways in which we can be watched are;

• 4.2m CCTV cameras
• 300 CCTV appearances a day
• Reg. plate recognition cameras
• Shop RFID tags
• Mobile phone triangulation
• Store loyalty cards
• Credit card transactions
• London Oyster cards
• Satellites
• Electoral roll
• NHS patient records
• Personal video recorders
• Phone-tapping
• Hidden cameras/bugs
• Worker call monitoring
• Worker clocking-in
• Mobile phone cameras
• Internet cookies
• Keystroke programmes

The great problem with surveillance is the contrast between the compulsive behaviour of those promoting and using it and the Public concern that sooner or later it will be abused and it is a poor substitute for on the ground policing by, whisper it, human police. Indeed as the CCTV craze has taken hold in Britain “real” police have largely disappeared from the streets of the UK. Instead you are more likely to see what are deprecatingly called “Plastic PCs”, Police Community Support Officers who don’t have the same training, pay or powers. Even when you do ring the Police your chances are now slim that you’ll actually meet a Police Officer. You will be put through to a centralised call centre where civilian staff will “prioritise” your call. Unless you become a “CAT A”, an emergency blue light response, as the control staff are incentivised to ditch as many calls as possible, your chances of saying "Hello Officer!" are slim. Mobile phone theft? I’ll take your details and give you a reference to claim from your insurance company. Car window broken? Unless you actually saw it happen you can’t assume it is a crime. And my favourite is that the Metropolitan Police don’t respond to burglaries unless the thief is still on the premises!

In fact only 3% of crimes are solved using CCTV and in many cases where it is available it is unusable or unfit for evidence because there are no national standards. Indeed often the Police simply do not have time to go through the amount of material available so it is simply not examined. So as a cynical public and police officers alike have pointed out CCTV may document crime but it rarely seems to prevent it. The public don’t want their mugging to be captured on high quality CCTV, they would much prefer if it didn’t happen in the first place!


The other issue is the widespread abuse of personal data and failure to comply with the Data Protection Act. Every CCTV camera trained on a public place should state in a prominent place on a notice specified in the Act why the images are being recorded, who is responsible and how they are to be contacted. It is little known that you can apply for this Data from the Data Controller of the company concerned as you can for any other data under the Data Protection act (DPA). But the law is widely flouted and the enforcement is totally ineffectual. Take one case of many I could give, the achingly hip St. Martin’s Lane Hotel in the Central London street of the same name, so hip it doesn’t even have a sign and the cheapest room is £230 a night. It describes itself thus;

“From its dazzling location at the hub of Covent Garden, West End theatres and Trafalgar Square, St Martins Lane is a dramatic and daring reinvention of the urban resort. Smart, witty and sophisticated, Philippe Starck’s design is a brilliant collision of influences - from the modern to the baroque - that suffuses the hotel with energy, vitality and magic.”

Well one influence it has little danger of colliding with is the DPA, for it has no less than 8 CCTV cameras trained on the busy public streets around the hotel but not a single notice as required under the DPA. Obviously too “Smart, witty and sophisticated” to comply with the law of the land.

Perhaps given the failure of CCTV to solve crime, the huge waste of resources in surveillance, the lack of control of the increasing much resented surveillance in our lives which is changing the very nature of society and the total failure to ensure effective data controls it is time to roll back “Big Brother” and get the police out of their strategy and liaison meetings and fighting something as boring as crime in real time instead of investing in more toys for the boys?

“It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.”

George Orwell. 1984.