One of the common stories throughout London is the massive extent the city relies on surveillance equipment on a daily basis. Walking around the city, you do notice a larger than usual amount of video cameras watching silently from so many London street corners. The common statistic that gets thrown around in many discussions is a quote from The Sunday Times from almost two years ago and is referred “to the results of a study by the Government's privacy watchdog” (the Office of the Information Commissioner), which “found that a single person can be caught on a national network of 4.2 million CCTV cameras an average 300 times a day”. This statistic has been praised by activists in the campaign against surveillance and what they see as the erosion of liberty. But this seems like a highly dubious estimate, based on a count on two London streets nearly a decade ago. There are no official statistics on the numbers of cameras operated by homeowners and shopkeepers, cameras the 4.2 million figure purports to include. All that can be known with any degree of certainty is the number of cameras used by the 428 local borough authorities throughout the country, which operates nearly 60,000 cameras in 2009. In addition to those cameras, the observation centers of many boroughs also monitor the footage of cameras owned by private citizens, who pay the boroughs a fee for the monitoring service.
The only thing that is known is that video surveillance is widely accepted in Britain, viewed as a fact of life rather than an Orwellian intrusion. Britain has enthusiastically embraced video surveillance over the last two decades in an effort to reduce crime. It has approved more cameras per capita than any other European country and is widely reported to have the most of any country in the world, though that comparison is not based on reliable data. After the riots that tore through the UK weeks ago, CCTV showed its power to capture public unrest, but will be tested to bring prosecution to an unprecedented percentage of rioters. Arrests resulting from the CCTV footage were applauded by many Britons, but the cost of each arrest is high. Big Brother Watch estimates that the more than 600 million pounds spent on installing and operating CCTV cameras between 1996 and 2010 could have paid the salaries of some 4,500 extra cops per year. Boots on the street could have been more effective than cameras in staunching the violence of the last few weeks before it had spun out of control. Plus, according to an internal Metropolitan Police report, less than 1 crime was solved per year for every 1000 CCTV cameras in London.
Banksy`s tribute to CCTV
As stated earlier, the exact number of CCTV cameras in the UK is not known for certain because there is no requirement to register CCTV cameras. However, research published in CCTV Image magazine estimates that the number of cameras in the UK is 1.85 million. This works out as an average of one camera for every 32 people in the UK, although the density of cameras varies from place to place to such a degree as to make this figure almost meaningless. The report also claims that the average person on a typical day would be seen by 70 CCTV cameras, although many of these sightings would be brief glimpses from cameras in shops. The City of London, the central business district, has the highest rate per resident, at 86.2 cameras per person, but it is not technically a borough, and the ratio is distorted because so few people live there. Of the residential districts in Greater London, the borough of Wandsworth has the highest number of cameras per person, with just under four cameras per 1,000 people. Its total number of cameras (1,113) is more than the police departments of Boston, Johannesburg and Dublin City Council COMBINED. One of the most dramatic revelations is that both the Shetland Islands Council and Corby Borough Council - among the smallest local authorities in the UK - have more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department. False sense of security or crime fighters?