Justin over at Chicken Yoghurt has been a touch Boris obsessed for my taste recently, but he’s back on form:

CCTV boom has failed to slash crime, say police
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…

Personally, I’d add 76 more “Ha ha ha”s and a “Yay” - celebrating the failure of CCTV, not the failure of CCTV to reduce the crime rate.

From the Guardian article:

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 serious point is that this will be used as a battering ram to argue for a Bigger Brother and more intrusion. That needs to be watched and stopped. And the resources wasted on some CCTV systems need to be diverted to policing methods that a) work and b) respect Civil Liberties.

There is an audio interview attached to the Guardian article, including the following:

“There have been previous attempts to put together a database of pictures of the convicted. That has now been temporarily put on hold because the technology is not advanced enough yet”

Or to put it another way - it will be done when the technology is available.

On a related subject - that of the DNA database - it started out that samples were voluntary, and involuntary samples required the person to be suspected of a serious offence and approved by a Superintendant or more senior officer. Now we have compulsion of the innocent.

Both of these initiatives are slippery slopes going in the wrong direction.