Smile! More and more, you’re on camera

Licata noted that he had supported the plan when it was introduced in May, but he said he changed his mind after Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, head of London’s Metropolitan Police, reported that the city’s network of near-ubiquitous public cameras had been “an utter fiasco.”

“Only 3 percent of crimes were solved by CCTV,” or closed-circuit television cameras, Neville said in an address to the Security Document World Conference last month. “There’s no fear of CCTV.

“Why don’t people fear it?” he asked. “The cameras are not working.”

In light of the evidence — or the lack of it — other officials are starting to have second thoughts. Fenty, for example, was forced to implement his plan by issuing emergency rules after a majority of the D.C. Council took steps to block it.

Police officials in San Francisco, meanwhile, have delayed approving installation of new cameras pending a final study from researchers at the University of California, who said in a preliminary report this spring that the city’s 68 anti-crime cameras had failed to deter street crime. Where the cameras had any impact, the interim report said, they simply moved crime down the street or around the corner.

“There are piles of studies that show the greatest deterrent to criminal and uncivil behavior in public parks is through active social programming and the presence of police or similar official personnel,” Licata said in his newsletter.

Where should crime go?
Lois Frankel, mayor of West Palm Beach, Fla. — which started using 13 cameras this year and plans to install 12 more — agrees with Licata on that point, saying video surveillance “is not a replacement for good police work.”

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t a worthwhile “tool in the toolbox,” she said.

Rochester Police Chief David Moore echoed that assessment. He welcomed plans to install about 50 more cameras in the city but said he was also beefing up street patrols, because criminals usually moved elsewhere.

Indeed, critics and some researchers make a point of the tendency of cameras to simply relocate crime.

“The real issue for us is that once you put cameras in one area, what happens is crime doesn’t stop, it just moves a little bit,” said Rebecca Burnhart, policy director for the ACLU in Texas. “That creates an incentive to put cameras on the next street and the next street and the next street.”

Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo, who has tangled with Burnhart over the city’s cameras, doesn’t understand why some would consider that a problem. If cameras chase criminals around, he said, “so be it.”

“I really believe in my heart that if you keep the heat on the criminal element, that eventually they get tired of your city, and they’ll move somewhere else,” Acevedo said.

He added: “We have lost our innocence in terms of the number of people that are getting killed and injured out here.”

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