A the United Kingdom land of the oppressed and observed. There isn’t really anywhere you can go without being on some CCTV camera, especially in London. Their government is always spouting how critical all these camera are to the security of it’s citizens. So how critical are they? The metric I believe would be the number of crimes solved using these camera. In thatt case they are a miserable failure. From Bruce Schneier’s blog comes a story about how effective those cameras are. Well the rate isn’t so hot.
The cameras in London are responsible for helping solve one crime for every 1,000 cameras. Of course that means the cost to solve each crime is astronomical, in fact it’s about £20,000 per crime.
At that price you can almost hire one new constable for each camera. With the added benefit of each constable being a mobile unit that can respond to a crime, as opposed to a camera which can only passively watch, you also increase the number of jobs which will help unemployment numbers.
London really needs to look at their cost to benefit ratio on these cameras and come up with a better solution than spying on it’s citizens 24 hours a day every day.