By Tom Espiner, 18 May 2009 08:29
NEWS
The police cannot deal with the amount of information generated by CCTV cameras, according to the director of information for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo).
Ian Readhead, director of information for the Acpo Criminal Records Office, said last week that police were being overwhelmed by the volume of such data, and that one of his major concerns was that police did not have the capability to track a car in real-time using the Automatic Number Plate Recognition System (ANPR).
"The problem is the amount of data," said Readhead, speaking at a data protection event in London on Wednesday. "The worry for me is that a child is kidnapped in Kent, and [the car] goes through a number of cameras, not being picked up."
The ANPR uses optical character recognition to convert digital pictures of car number plates into characters, which are then held in a list. The technology was rolled out in part to aid the tracking of suspects, but, according to Readhead, there is simply too much information for the police to be able to use.
Conservative shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve said the efficacy of CCTV as a crime fighting tool was dubious, adding that police use of CCTV was hampered by lack of resources.
"CCTV provides evidence but evidence firstly doesn't prevent crime, and secondly in many cases the police don't have the time or resources to look at CCTV [footage]," said Grieve. "In fighting crime, mass surveillance through CCTV is highly questionable."
Michael Wills, the minister of state for the Ministry of Justice, said at the same conference that CCTV had public support.
"I don't believe CCTV is a mistake. My constituents are begging for it," said Wills. "We are living in a very rapidly changing world. Technology is driving that [change], it's not because the government is hell-bent on controlling everyone."
In February a House of Lords committee called for an end to "pervasive" surveillance in the UK.
Comments
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1. karen challinor
I believe I've made the "throwing more hay on the haystack is not the best way to find the needle" comment several times before, looks like I'm finally vindicated, although this simply means the home office is going to throw money at automatic monitoring systems to try and fill the gap
the home office research study #292, although performed on a relatively small area, seems to indicate CCTV is not proven to be effective unless used in conjunction with other methods, which seems to indicate it's the other methods and not CCTV that are the effective part of the equation
they are useful for providing evidence after the fact, providing you can find staff who have the time to trawl through the footage, as such they provide a false sense of security while not preventing or actually deterring crime they can provide evidence after the criminal is caught
and their biggest use by far seems to be as a revenue stream by selling footage to television companies for use in these incessant "cctv city" type programmes
2. Roy Lambert
"I don't believe CCTV is a mistake. My constituents are begging for it," said Wills.
Are these the same people desparate to get their hands on an ID card?
3. Muzza
Surely all they need is to have those plate numbers put into a DB and have a simple business intelligence software to read through them, sending alerts when they come across the "baddies"... there is even software that would allow them to ping an alert to the nearest available copper on his blackberry! Now there is even a US company that does all of this (except the alerting part, but someone else does that!)