CCTV and the crime situation

Jan 14, 2014 Editorial

Apart from the scrutiny facing the impending establishment of the police SWAT unit, citizens might wish to be enlightened about the role the Close Circuit Television is expected to play in combating or better still preventing crime. In other words what’s in it for them?
Already we have seen the conflicting views expressed on the uses and accessibility of CCTV by two Government officials in the persons of the Crime Chief and the Cabinet Secretary. That situation in itself therefore justifies any state of confusion which might exist in people’s minds.
Several questions arise. How is the surveillance system intended to work? How will it be deployed? How will the persons tasked with monitoring the cameras be selected and whom will they be reporting to? What are the expected outcomes? How will these be evaluated and by whom? And what are the legal risks and responsibilities in terms of personal privacy violations by the state?
If we were to reflect on the possible desirable results from introducing CCTV, several things should come immediately to mind the foremost being the reduction in crime and the fear of crime. Second and no less important is the removal of the fear of misuse particularly by agents of the state for political ends.
“CCTV doesn’t actually do anything since it is the operators that produce the results required” (French 1998). Creation of a non-partisan oversight body (if such an animal exists) might be the way to go if these quite justifiable fears are to be disabused.”
Crime prevention interventions have been shown to produce two results namely displacement and diffusion. Displacement may occur in one or more ways, those being functional, geographical, temporal, tactical, target and/or perpetrator and occurs as a consequence of crime fighting measures be it hotspots policing or use of CCTV.
This effectively means that any or all of the methods mentioned are moved from a criminal environment to another more favourable to their needs. More often than not, it is the actual and potential criminal offenders who are forced to move their activities to a more vulnerable alternative geographical space which is less patrolled or surveilled and therefore much more suited to their criminal exploits.
One very real concern is that the proliferation of CCTV in commercial and more affluent residential areas will lead to the displacement of crime to poorer areas with implications for the social ecology of those places (Davies, 1995).
Diffusion on the other hand refers to the positive crime initiatives benefits being experienced by neighbouring communities by a reduction in the commission of criminal offences. However, this may serve to distort the true picture as it relates to the effectiveness of the CCTV intervention, since the drop in crime in neighbouring communities would also be seen as reduced when a comparison with the monitored area is made (Clarke, 1995).
If the Guyana Police Force is to allay certain fears and garner the necessary community support, it should, as a part of its public information policy initiative, advise the general public of the answers to the questions listed above.
But perhaps the GPF might wish to go further by citing the likely results anticipated through the introduction of the CCTV. One aspect that should be guarded against and which makes the foregoing suggestion all the more critical is the possibility that members of the public could be misled into mistakenly assuming that with the presence of CCTV-monitoring operators, their responsibility to report crimes is reduced.
This belief can have serious implications for the statistics on reported crime, and crime rates since there is no guarantee that everything will be observed in real time by the operator.
Therefore victimization surveys would be the way to go as they can be designed to examine recorded crime rates before and after CCTV installation. These will bring out whether rates are affected by increased detections or are a factor of underreporting by victims.
In the final analysis there can be no cogent argument against the positive role that CCTV can play in preventing crime.

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