People are selected and targeted by "Spy-cameras" according to the prejudices of the CCTV operators, a damning new study by one of the regions top Criminologists shows.
"The young, the male and the black were systematically and disproportionately targeted, not because of their involvement in crime or disorder, but for 'no obvious reason'", says the study. Also targeted were young people described as "scrotes", the homeless, and "anyone who directly challenged... the right of the cameras to monitor them..."
1 in 10 women were targeted for entirely "voyeuristic" reasons by the male operators, according to the researchers.
"The unforgiving Eye: CCTV surveillance in public space" was published last month by Dr Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong of the Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice at Hull University. The study was designed to find out who was watched by public CCTV systems. Researchers "shadowed" camera operators in 3 major areas covered by a total of 148 cameras. They took details of " "888 targeted surveillances" which resulted in just 12 arrests.
They found:
Only people wearing "uniforms" were completely exempt from targeting.
The 888 monitored "targeting" led to 45 "deployments" of police and 12 arrests - 7 related to fighting and 3 to theft. The report notes:
"The low level of deployment was accounted for by 2 factors: that CCTV operators could not themselves intervene nor could they demand intervention by the police. This was compounded by the fact that suspicion rarely had a concrete, objective basis which made it difficult to justify to a third party such as a police officer why intervention was warranted."
The report concludes:
"The gaze of the cameras does not fall equally on all users of the street but on those who are stereotypical predefined as potentially deviant, or through appearance and demeanour, are singled out by operators as unrespectable. In this way youth, particularly those already socially and economically marginal, may be subject to even greater levels of authoritative intervention and official stigmatisation, and rather than contributing to social justice through the reduction of victimisation, CCTV will merely become a tool of injustice through the amplification of differential and discriminatory policing."
The report also looked into the future of CCTV in public places by interviewing system managers and CCTV professionals in the industry. Their vision is one of "the power of the Panoptican" - "an instrument of social control and the production of discipline; the production of 'anticipatory conformity'; the certainty of rapid deployment to observed deviance and; the compilation of individualised dossiers of the monitored population".
The prospect of the last of these objectives has been quickly recognised by the police and has led to the "proliferation of separate pictorial databases created for various subgroups of known or potential offenders, which can be matched through semi automated techniques. Following on the footsteps of the hooligan database, used during the Euro 1996 football competition, others are being compiled on demonstrators and bank robbers and suspected illegal immigrants and these will no doubt be augmented by pictorial databases to be compiled on animal rights activists, environmental campaigners, shop lifters and so on."
It is anticipated that developments in computer software will allow automatic image recognition capabilities for faces in much the same way as is already used for vehicle license plates in the City of London and some motorway networks.
Copies of the report are available from Dr Clive Norris, Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX.
Tel: 01482 465817/465779
Price £4, with cheques payable to the University of Hull.