CCTV boom has failed to slash crime, say police. Solution? Throw more money at it:

Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.

The warning comes from the head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard as the force launches a series of initiatives to try to boost conviction rates using CCTV evidence. They include:

• A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders.
• Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month.
• Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined.

Meet your Surveillance State future, now with extra Post-Privacy. They’re going to put suspected criminals images on the ‘net? Yeah, like that’s not going to lead to massive false-positives, careers, reputations and lives destroyed?!

Talk about pig-headed, these police have decided CCTV is the way of the future, but camera’s will never replace manpower on the ground! Most especially because they can’t jump off the wall and intervene to prevent a crime. OK, YET! :D

No wonder Cory’s bringing the generous anger in Little Brother. Fight back! Even if it’s just by getting your kid sibling to read this book.

via BoingBoing

See Also:

• One Nation Under CCTV