KDIS Home The failure of public CCTV systems in Airedale

(A presentation given to Shipley East Labour Party meeting, 8/10/97, by the 1 in 12 Club)

WHY WE'RE HERE

We're here to talk about CCTV in public town centres.

Our position tends to be represented, even by ourselves, as being opposed to public CCTV. It's actually a bit more subtle than that.

We are very concerned at the intrusive nature of these Spy cameras - the "civil liberties" issue if you like. They do represent a gross invasion of peoples privacy, and people have a right to privacy even in public places. Putting the population under 24 hour high-tech surveillance in this way is not something that should be undertaken lightly.

And, to be fair to those who promote these systems, they recognise that, or at least pay lip service to those concerns. So, for instance, you get councillors describing them as "a necessary evil". What they are saying is that there are benefits, in terms of tackling crime, that outweigh the dangers.

What we say is this: That those benefits have to be very great indeed to justify these systems, and they must be quite clearly demonstrable. We also say that it is the responsibility of those who promote these systems to justify them, not ours to put up contra arguments.

This hasn't happened. There has been no information, no evaluation, no debate. The issue hasn't even been discussed by any council committee, nor has any council expense ever been approved by any committee. There still exists no council policy on CCTV. These systems have just been imposed on us.

What we want to do here today is to look at those justifications for CCTV and to question them. But first, a bit of background.

BACKGROUND

In 1992 the first CCTV cameras went up in Bradford, covering car parks and subways. Over the years they've been added to, including cameras covering city centre public areas. There are now 37 of them.

This doesn't include the 13 traffic cameras around the centre, that you see mounted on tall poles. Nor the other council CCTV cameras covering various public buildings, or those on housing blocks etc. Nor the thousands of private cameras you see everywhere. We're concerning ourselves only with those systems covering the town centres.

In 1992 the Home Office published a survey which showed that 80% of the public supported CCTV systems. The government responded with a multi-million pound scheme to help fund CCTV systems that has seen systems appear in almost every local authority area in the country. Britain is truly becoming a "surveillance society".

In late 1994/early 1995 the systems went up in Keighley and Bingley, 18 cameras in total, with more on the way. So far around £1.5 million of mostly public money has been spent on these cameras. The majority of this money has come from council coffers.

Shipley, as you know, has a planned scheme due to disfigure the town centre soon. The system in Bradford has developed in a fairly ad-hoc manner, so for the purpose of this talk I'm going to concentrate on the schemes in Keighley, Bingley and Shipley.

THE CASE FOR PUBLIC CCTV

The supposed benefits of public CCTV was summed up pretty succinctly by former Government minister David Curry in 1995:

"CCTV catches criminals. It spots crime, identifies law breakers and helps convict the guilty. And just as importantly, it makes people feel safer when they are out and about".

There are 3 claimed benefits:

I want to deal with each separately.

1) CCTV catches criminals

This is the primary justification for CCTV and is the easiest of the 3 to measure. So, after over 18 months and £1/3 million how many criminals has CCTV in Keighley and Bingley caught. The police claim 1 - someone caught interfering with a car. That's it. We have to say that we find this particular claim extremely iffy, but we'll be generous and allow them 1 success.

So, we conclude that, as far as catching criminals, CCTV is a total flop.

2) CCTV reduces crime.

This is actually very hard to measure, because you're trying to count crimes that never happened. It's only really possible to try to determine probable effects by looking at changes in crime pattern trends.

So what do the proponents of CCTV claim?

Well, for Keighley, nothing. In fact, privately the police admit that, in this respect too, CCTV has been a flop.

In Bingley, however, they make more impressive claims: In September 1996, writing in the Aire Valley Target, Shipley Inspector Nigel Cawthorne first revealed:

"Crime in Bingley has fallen by almost 50% since their scheme was installed". This claim has been repeated often. I remember a presentation at a Shipley area panel in January by the Shipley Town centre manager when he repeated the claim: "CCTV has halved crime in Bingley".

Unfortunately, the claim just isn't true.

The figures on which it is based were eventually produced by Inspector Hancox of Bingley police. The area covered is only Bingley centre, just 1 of 12 beat areas in Bingley.

Subsequently, the claim was watered down a bit, so by April a certain hopeful parliamentary Labour candidate was able to claim in his election leaflet:

"As a councillor Chris Leslie campaigned for closed circuit television security in Shipley and in Bingley where town centre crime has since been halved". Town centre crime has since been halved.

Unfortunately, that wasn't true either. Again, the figures produced dealt only with "Damage/burglary" - just 2 of 13 categories of crime.

What Inspector Hancox's figures actually purported to show was that SOME crime in PART of Bingley had halved. Precisely,that the total for "Damage/Burglary" had dropped by 50% from 1995, before the cameras went up, to 1996 when the cameras were operating.

Still, surely that proves that the cameras have worked, doesn't it?

Unfortunately not. If you look at the comparative figures for burglary in Shipley town centre over the same period, which make a good "control" sample. you find exactly the same result. A 50% fall. The difference is that there are no cameras in Shipley.

So, exactly the same trend in Shipley where there are no cameras - so you can't claim that this trend is due to cameras. So the evidence in support of this claim vanishes.

Of course, it may still be the case that the cameras in Bingley are responsible for the drop there and the same pattern in Shipley is just coincidental. But these selective figures certainly don't constitute proof.

This is the trouble with this sort of selective use of figures - you can prove almost anything you choose. In fact, you can even prove completely contradictory things at the same time!

Let me demonstrate. I want to show you 2 lots of figures produced at different times by Inspector Hancox. Both are meant to show crime patterns in Bingley Town Centre over the same 2 year period, 1993-1994.

crime figs - damage/burglary

Take a look at version 1. The crime figures, these are "damage/burglary", are shown in blue. The red line is a "trend line" - a linear regression or "best fit" trend line for those who are interested. It shows how the figures are moving overall. Clearly here they're going down.

crime figs - damage

Now version 2. These are for "damage". Here they're going up. Quite a difference. Remember, these are for the same area, the same period, even, we think, the same incidents.

I'd like to say that it is possible to establish at least a fair idea of the likely impact of CCTV on crime. It has been done. Not in this country, but in Scotland.

In 1996 a report by the Scottish Office's senior criminologists, Jason Ditton and Emma Short, was published. It was an evaluation of the CCTV system introduced in Airdrie in 1992. It showed how detailed police statistics can be analysed to indicate the effects of CCTV on reducing crime. I should say that Jason Ditton has been very critical of the type of figures produced by our own Inspector Hancox.

This report is not perfect and we would have criticisms. But its miles ahead of anything attempted in this country so far. For the record, Ditton concluded that the Airdrie cameras had probably led to a 20% reduction in crime. Alas, this wasn't greeted too enthusiastically at the time by Strathclyde police, who had been claiming a 75% reduction.

In order to undertake this kind of study, you need to look at local and regional trends, to investigate possible crime displacement, both geographical and functional. You need to use a control group. You need detailed local crime figures - beat statistics. So far the police here have refused to make these available to us.

I'd like to mention one more aspect of this. At the end of his report, Ditton said:

"A separate issue, and also one not addressed in this study, relates to the cost effectiveness ... of open street surveillance CCTV. (CCTV) would only be a benefit if we could also show that the cost of installing, maintaining and running a CCTV installation ... was less than the "cost" of the offending so prevented."

A crucial point. And funnily enough, in the case of Bingley, we can look at this.

If we take Inspector Hancox and his figures at face value, for the sake of argument, then he is claiming that the cameras have resulted in a 50% reduction in "damage/burglary" in the town centre and he produced figures showing these crimes. They included figures for 1994, showing 65 incidents of damage/burglary.

It so happens we have a list of those incidents, together with the cost of those crimes. I think these are the amounts claimed for insurance, and you can bet that they're on the high side. They range from claims of £20 to £1800.

The total for the year is around £16,000.

So, if these crimes were halved, you would be saving around £8000 a year.

Now the cost of the cameras works out at between £30,000 and £50,000 a year, depending which figures you use.

However you look at it, the cameras cost about 4 times as much as the problem they're supposed to be solving.

So, in conclusion, we believe that the best that can be said for CCTV in terms of reducing crime is that it is uncertain. The only way to resolve this is to have an thorough, independent evaluation of the Keighley and Bingley systems. That's what we, along with Bradford Trades Council and others have been pushing for since February. So far the council have refused to do this.

2) CCTV makes people feel safer.

This claim is even harder to measure than the last one.

What usually happens is a survey of public opinion. In 1992 the Home Office conducted such a survey, and asked people if they thought CCTV made them feel safer. Over 80% answered "YES".

I have to say, that if I was asked that in 1992 I too might have answered "YES". And if someone says "CCTV makes me feel safer", you can't really argue with them.

What happens then is that the survey is reported, as was the Home Office one, like this:

"80% of people say that CCTV makes them feel safer." But that's not quite the same thing. It's a very subtle difference, I know. What the survey showed was, that when asked a question, 80% answered "YES". It didn't actually measure how they felt when out on the street - what their real experience was.

Is this just nit-picking. I don't think so.

The reality on the streets is, I think, that most people are totally unaware of the cameras for most of the time. And if you're unaware that they're there, how can they make you feel safer? I remember once phoning Bingley library, after the cameras there had been up for a year, to see if they had any information about them. After much discussion between the library staff they finally told me that none of them had ever heard of any CCTV cameras in Bingley!

There was a recent television series on Channel 4 called "The Feel Good factor". In one program they undertook an interesting experiment. A man and a woman were wired up so that their heart rate could be measured, to see how frightened they were at any time. They were also fitted with special glasses so that everything they saw was filmed, and their voices were recorded. They were then sent to cross town at night.

What became clear was that when they entered an area covered by CCTV, there heart beat showed no sign of "less fear". Indeed, in both cases these were the areas that they showed the most fear. In the woman's case, she even looked up at one of the cameras and commented how, in fact, it didn't make her feel in the slightest bit safer. What was also notable was that it was simple measures, like better street lighting, that made the most difference.

What's also notable about this claim - that CCTV makes people feel safer - is that it sounds like a bit of a con. It is never claimed that CCTV actually makes people safer, just that it makes them feel safer. But if people aren't actually safer, and the evidence is that they aren't, then this is surely dangerous thing.

CCTV certainly doesn't make people safer. A recent study by South Bank University indicated that CCTV seemed to result in "functional displacement" of crime - that is, that certain crimes like vehicle crimes went down, whilst others like robbery went up.

And, more than anything else, the installation of CCTV results in less police officers on the street. According to Privacy International it's a straight swap - for each camera that goes up one cop is taken off the street. The police make no secret of the fact that their main reason for support of CCTV in public places is improved "resource management".

The effects have been particularly noticeable in Bingley. When the cameras were first planned there were 34 police officers based at Bingley. 9 months later they were down to 24 and it was announced that they would be cut to just 3! There was, not surprisingly, a public outcry, but there is, at the moment, only 16 now based there and this will inevitably fall.

In conclusion to this factor then, we'd say that the perception is probably still in favour of CCTV, but it's changing rapidly with experience.

CONCLUSION

In the end, proponents of CCTV, such as it's main advocate on the council, Jack Womersley, fall back on the fact that the majority of people support CCTV. And that is true. At the moment people are fed a diet of pro-CCTV messages - T.V. programmes like "Eye-Spy" which are little more than 30 minute adverts for CCTV. The local paper, the T&A, supports CCTV, even to the extent of putting money into the Keighley, Bingley and Shipley systems. This is, in itself I think, a questionable thing for a supposedly independent newspaper to be doing. And the council clearly promote CCTV.

None the less, views are changing. In 1992 over 80% of the public supported CCTV. But that is falling rapidly with experience. The council itself conducted a survey of every household in the Bradford Met area earlier this year, as part of it's Community Plan. Over 4000 responses were received. What has never been made public is the extent of opposition to CCTV that survey showed. 40% were opposed to public CCTV schemes.

According to Privacy International this sea change in public opinion is happening everywhere. Already, it is claimed, a majority of young people are opposed to the systems. And this is before any proper public debate on the issue has been started.

And yet, it was announced last week that the council is planning to spend another £300,000 on cameras in Bradford. Again, without discussion.

WE say it is time to call a halt to any more spending on these systems until such time as a proper independent evaluation of the existing systems is conducted, and a proper public debate initiated.

Thank you for listening.


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