When we were over on our house/school hunting trip in May we watched a documentary on CCTV use in Britain. It walked through the evolution of CCTV in Britain and showed some scary footage – used to capture criminals. According to the UK HomeOffice site, the goal of CCTV is as follows:

Welcome to the Home Office CCTV website. The crime Reduction Programme CCTV Initiative provided over £170 million worth of funding to over 680 CCTV schemes. These schemes will be an important tool in the fight against crime in town centres, shopping centres, rural areas, car parks and transport links across England and Wales.

According to this site, the UK has more than 4 million cameras and if you walk through London you will end up on more than 300 cameras. In the documentary, they showed how CCTV was used to print each vehicle as it entered London, flagging suspicious vehicles (i.e. flagged criminals, stolen vehicles, etc.) in under 20 seconds.

Wikipedia has an interesting write up on the history of CCTV noting:

After the bombings of London on 7 July 2005, CCTV footage was used to identify the bombers. The media was surprised that few tube trains actually had CCTV cameras, and there were some calls for this to be increased.

The interesting evolution of the CCTV is the ‘talking CCTV’. In the documentary, they showed a few drunk revelers staggering down the street and one grabbing a sign and taking it with him until the CCTV called out ‘You, in the blue shirt, you are being monitored by the police. Put that sign back’. He spun around, shocked and then slowly put it back … worth a laugh.

On a personal level, they don’t bother me. There are many sites that make the big brother connection, but one has to wonder – if you are not doing anything wrong – who cares? All I had to watch was this man standing alone at 12PM after a nightshift at a bus stop when 4 hooligans came out of nowhere and attack him viciously – all caught on camera. Five minutes later, all 4 of them were in custody and an ambulance was on site.

The Science Museum had a different view of the CCTV ..