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UK: Home Office reports show CCTV fails to cut crime

01 January 2005

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In February a Home Office project on the impact of closed-circuit-television, carried out at 14 sites in town centres, city centres, hospitals and residential areas, reported that most of the systems failed to cut crime or make people feel safer. The report says: "the CCTV schemes that have been assessed had little over all effect on crime levels. Even where changes in crime levels have been noted, with the exception of those related to car parks, very few are larger than could be due to chance alone and all could in fact represent either chance variation or confounding factors. Where crime levels went up it is not reasonable to conclude that CCTV had a negative impact."

The study, which was headed by Professor Martin Gill, of the University of Leicester, found only "two schemes that experienced a statistically significant reduction in recorded crime" but in only one of these was CCTV a "significant factor" in the reduction. The study also found that under-staffing of CCTV control room operations was an important factor in the system's failure to detect crime, with half of the centres staffed for less than 24 hours a day. Gill told the BBC that the results would be "disappointing" for proponents of the cameras: "For the most CCTV did not produce a reduction in crime and it did not make people feel safer", he said. The government is estimated to have spent nearly £200 million on around 700 CCTV projects in the five years between 1998 and 2003. A Home Office spokeswoman said that the police continued to believe that CCTV was "essential" to cut crime.

Martin Gill, Jeena Allen, jane Bryan, Deena Kara, Ross Little, Sam Waples, Angela Spriggs, Javier Argomaniz, Patricia Jessiman, Jonothan Kilworth & Daniel Swain, "The Impact of CCTV: fourteen case studies" Home Office Online Report 15/05; Martin Gill and Angela Spriggs "Assessing the Impact of CCTV" Home Office research and development Department (February) 2005: http:\\www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/hors292.pdf

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