Big Brother sleeping on the job

LONDON - The effectiveness of CCTV as a weapon against crime was thrown into doubt yesterday after figures showed only one crime per year is solved in London for every 1000 cameras.

The figures were revealed in an internal Metropolitan Police report, which also carried warnings by a senior officer at Scotland Yard, who said that the police must do more to head off a crisis in public confidence over the use of CCTV cameras.

Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said officers should raise their game by making captured images count against criminals.

One estimate puts the total number of CCTV cameras in Britain at 4.2 million, or one for every 14 people.

There are more than one million CCTV cameras in London, and the British Government has spent £500 million ($1.2 billion) on the equipment.

But last year, only 1000 crimes were solved using CCTV images because officers failed to make the most of potentially vital evidence.

In the report, Neville said people are filmed many times every day and have high expectations when they become victims of crime.

But he suggested that the reality was often disappointing as, in some cases, officers do not bring criminals to justice even after they are caught on camera and identified.

Neville said CCTV played a role in capturing just eight out of 269 suspected robbers across London in one month.

Critics of Britain's so-called "surveillance state" are likely to seize on his comments as further evidence that CCTV is not helping police win the fight against crime.

Former shadow Home Secretary David Davis described the report as "unsurprising". He said: "It should provoke a major, overdue rethink on where the Home Office crime prevention budget is being spent. CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness. It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.

"The Metropolitan Police has been extraordinarily slow to act to deal with the ineffectiveness of CCTV, something true both in London and across the country."

The Metropolitan Police is piloting a scheme, known as Operation Javelin, to improve the use of images from existing cameras. Staff in 11 boroughs have created dedicated Visual Images Identification and Detections Offices.

These collect and label images before passing them on to a central circulation unit that distributes them to officers, forces and the media. Some 5260 images have been viewed so far this year, with identification made in more than 1000 cases.

Neville said the scheme should be expanded across the force in an attempt to make the investigation of CCTV evidence as professional as fingerprinting and DNA technology.

Detective Superintendent Michael McNally, who commissioned the report, said improvements in the use of CCTV can be made.

"There are some concerns, and that's why we have a number of projects that are ongoing at the moment," he said. "CCTV is a really important part of investigation and prevention of crime, so how we retrieve that from the individual CCTV pods is really quite important."

A Metropolitan Police spokesman added: "The Metropolitan Police is currently the only police service to employ this method of CCTV tracking."

EYES WIDE SHUT
* 1 crime in 1 year is solved in London from 1000 cameras
* CCTV helped capture 8 out of 269 suspected robbers across London in 1 month.

- INDEPENDENT