Britons, most watched people of the world

[TriWooOx]

Quote:Britain’s local authorities have spent £515 million in the past four years to maintain their CCTV operations, an amount that would put an extra 4,121 police constables on the streets, local media reported.


At least 51,600 CCTV cameras are now operating under the control of local authorities, with five councils now operating more than 1,000 cameras.

According to figures, Britain is home to 20 percent of the world’s population of CCTV cameras, despite being home to just one percent of the world’s population.

The country’s surveillance culture is so out-of-control that it is doing little to improve public safety. On the other hand, this culture has made the British cities the most watched in the world.

One study suggested the average Londoner is caught on camera more than 300 times every day.

Despite millions of cameras, Britain’s crime rate is not significantly lower than comparable countries that do not have such a vast surveillance state.

In an age of squeezed budgets, councils continue to pour huge amounts of money into technology that indiscriminately monitors all people as potential criminals, while the actual causes of crime go ignored.

Britain has become one of the most ‘watched’ societies in the world, far outstripping some authoritarian regimes, and the fervor with which some groups defend their ‘right’ to monitor all people is a social ill that few would recognize as a sign of a healthy, civil society.

The huge increase in surveillance has not been a coordinated and intelligence-led response to crime, but a haphazard and badly measured rush to spy on citizens.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/08/09/...e-culture/

[yeti]

CCTV boom has failed to slash crime, say police

Quote: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.