Guardian, Wednesday December 8, 1999

Everybody's on television now. The cameras start rolling almost from the moment we step outside our doors. We are routinely filmed as we walk down the high street and enter the shop to buy a newspaper. Police cameras take over as we drive down the dual carriageway to drop our children at school. Another hidden eye monitors the playground for signs of drug dealing. And so it goes on - in the office, at the cashpoint, at shopping malls, stations, airports, car parks, football grounds, public squares, even public conveniences.

Occasionally, we catch sight of ourselves on a screen in a shop doorway. But the real addicts of closed circuit television are the ones who are paid (not very much) to watch, day and night. Dr Clive Norris and Dr Gary Armstrong have had a glimpse inside those control rooms. Well, a bit more than a glimpse: they spent a total of 600 hours watching the people who watch us. Both are lecturers in criminology - Norris at Hull university and Armstrong at Reading university - and both have misgivings about the phenomenal growth of CCTV surveillance in the 1990s. Accordingly, they set out to ask some questions. Here are just a few:

Do the claims for drastic crime reduction attributed to CCTV by the home office and local authorities stand up to independent analysis? Could the £1bn spent on monitoring and system costs over the past decade have been used more effectively? If viewing surveillance is a form of power, what limits are placed on its operation by the democratic and legal processes?

Answers to these and many other questions are to be found in Norris and Armstrong's book, The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV.

When we meet in Hull, Norris and I travel by taxi from the university to his home in leafy Cottingham, where there are 10 cameras focused on various parts of the high street. While I pay the cab driver, Norris is switching off the burglar alarm. Aha! He's not averse then to using modern technology to deter crime? Of course not. Nor does he appear enthusiastic when I ask if he would like to dismantle all CCTV cameras tomorrow?

"No, probably not," he says after a pause. "They can be effective in limited circumstances - in car parks, for instance. And with the new generation of less primitive speed cameras, we have a chance to reduce pedestrian deaths in urban areas. Their use on railway crossings seems eminently sensible, and when cameras allow the police to locate a bomber, a rapist or a murderer then none of us could say it wasn't a social good."

It was, in fact, the abduction and subsequent murder of James Bulger in 1993 which projected CCTV images on to prime-time television at a time when the nation was going through one of its periodic bouts of moral panic. There were the killers, caught on camera for all the world to see. "The cameras didn't save the child," says Norris, "but they did play some part in the identification of those who killed him."

It was enough for the then home secretary, Michael Howard, to embrace surveillance technology as the major weapon in tackling the soaring crime rates of the early 1990s. The subsequent reduction in the rate of increase, Norris argues, was due to a number of factors, not least falling unemployment. "I've never been convinced that there could be a simple, silver-bullet solution to crime," he says. "One of my main gripes is that the last government invested 80% of the crime- prevention budget on technology which was never properly evaluated.

"Labour has embarked on a massive programme of crime reduction and they should be congratulated on building in a substantial sum for evaluation. But while the use of CCTV continues to spread, there still hasn't been a properly conducted home office survey into its effectiveness."

Norris and Armstrong felt it was high time to do some evaluating themselves. They spent days, nights and weekends in three different control rooms - one in a poor, multi-racial inner-city area, one in a prosperous country town and one in a major city centre. "In a busy street," says Norris, "there are hundreds of issues to focus on. So how do you decide who's a likely trouble-maker and who's not? The answer, in all cases, is that it's based on crude stereotypes."

The targets are men rather than women, young men rather than middle-aged or elderly men, black men before white men. If you're a young black man in a baseball cap, then your every move is likely to be under observation. "Older men are largely ignored," Norris says, "and when women are looked at, it's for voyeuristic reasons."

If the control room spots a crime taking place, it doesn't mean that the police or the security guards will respond, he says. "They have their own agendas. In our 600 hours, there were just 43 deployments." Surprisingly perhaps, there were more than three times as many in the county town as in the inner-city area. This was not a reflection of the level of criminal activity so much as the proximity of the control room and the local police station, and the relations between the two.

But, I ask Norris, what about the deterrent effect of the cameras? "They'll only deter someone," he says, "if they are aware that the cameras are there. In many independent studies, it's been found that a significant number of the population are unaware that they're under observation. Glasgow is a good example and one that has been properly evaluated by the Scottish Centre for Criminology. They also looked at the nearby small town of Airdrie, where awareness of the cameras led to a 21% reduction of town-centre crime over two years. Even that was considerably lower than the 74% figure put out by the local authority and repeated by the home office. Some of these figures are hugely inflated and based on the self-interest of CCTV promoters.

"In Glasgow, the effect of a very expensive surveillance system on the crime rate has been zero. It's a much bigger place than Airdrie, with a transient population. It's also a major drinking centre. CCTV does very little to stop crimes of violence, which worry the public most. When young men have had between five and 10 pints of lager and their honour is challenged, the presence of a camera makes no difference."

Surely, though, it makes a difference as to whether or not they're caught? "It may well do. And if a stranger is assaulted then, yes, that's important. If it's a punch-up between two men who know each other then I don't see what public interest is served by bringing them before the courts. The main way that order is kept on our streets is through the citizenry, not the police, who tend to respond when it's broken down. Who stops the fights? Your mates, in the main. And it's important that we don't have a scenario whereby the peacemakers won't get involved any more for fear of their actions being caught on camera and misinterpreted."

Norris professes himself slightly surprised that a country where the concept of Big Brother has become part of the language should benignly accept so many "little brothers and sisters" to the point where its citizens are, he says, the most filmed in the world "without any democratic or legal controls". To which I point out that most people assume that if they've done nothing wrong then they have nothing to fear.

"We all have something to hide," he says. "People have affairs. People hide their sexuality. Are these really matters of state concern?"

State concern? What has the state got to do with it? "People think of a camera operator watching over them benignly, but all the information is being stored. Real-time images can be connected to computers to be analysed."

What he sees as the possible long-term implications can best be summed up by the penultimate paragraph of the book: "The history of the 20th century should remind us that democratic institutions are not assured. They can be, and have been, captured by totalitarian regimes of both left and right. We should not be seduced by the myth of benevolent government, for while it may be only a cynic who questions the benign intent of their current rulers, it would surely be a fool who believed that such benevolence is assured in the future."