CCTV

The United Kingdom is undoubtedly the biggest user of what is called CCTV (closed circuit Television). Although this may sound fancy, CCTV is nothing more than security cameras placed all around cities, neighborhoods, stores, car parks, and military areas. It is estimated that the UK itself houses over 2 million CCTV cameras in the whole country, making for about a 1 camera for every 14 people ratio.

Although it is obvious that cameras are numerous and possibly bit exaggerated, I continued to wonder if they really did anything for society except for possibly invade privacy. After doing a bit of research, I found an unsatisfying answer. CCTV has been used over and over again to help solve bigger, media hyped cases in the UK. For example, CCTV helped to identify the two 10 year old boys who led 3 year old James Bulger out of a shopping mall and then killed him. However, on the other hand, a survey taken by the BBC showed that only 13 out of 24 cities had seen a decrease in crime since installing the CCTV cameras and furthermore 4 of the remaining cities had seen a significant rise in crime. Also, because the camera picture is said to come out quite grainy and are often positioned so high up that they only catch the tops of people's heads instead of their faces, which in the end does not really help to solve any sorts of crimes.

Myself, I am not concerned with the CCTV, I think that it helps more than it hurts, so why not have it? Even if the crime rate does not fall in every location that CCTV occupies, it doesn't matter. It helped someone, somewhere, at some point.