Surveillance technology such as CCTV is fast becoming popular for crime prevention and identification of offenders. The growing question is whether or not it is actually helping with reducing crime and disorders. This research is important because its results will show if there is a reduction in crime, it will also highlight the ways in which CCTV is failing and how it can be improved. This research will show the impact of CCTV used in public and individual surveillance.
Findings in the research showed a decrease in the levels of crime and it showed that every disorder category reduced significantly owing to the cameras. The effects of mounting pole cameras were minimal in residential areas and there was a significant scale down of calls concerning annoying groups and fights in areas prone to group meetings. Additionally cameras that were visibly mounted had a larger effect on crime reduction because people were more aware of them compared to the building mount cameras.
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It is important to have a long post intervention period to have reliable results in time-series analysis. Some of the cameras used were recently installed which made the post intervention period really low and produced unreliable results. One issue that was realized in the research was that there wasn’t much of a decrease in property related crime and for more benefits in public safety a geographically clustered system must be applied.
A possible extension to this paper would be to collect credible scientific evidence from social sciences on whether or not there is an appropriate return in investing in CCTV. Also, there should be more studies of the effects that CCTV may have on people, issues like giving people a false sense of safety. Lastly there is a need to look into how the use of cameras may be used as an investigative tool. This research should have looked into more geographical areas, for instance densely populated areas. Also, they should have found out how often the surveillance footage is watched and the steps taken after that.
