Ever since the UK riots last year, the importance of CCTV has become apparent. Back in the mid 90’s people didn’t respond well to this and saw it as an invasion of privacy. However the riots changed all this and anyone who has had their car stolen in a multistory car park knows just how helpful CCTV can be.
CCTV Cost
Many local councils invest heavily in CCTV systems and this is because they know it pays. For instance if we just look at Hackney in London, as a result of CCTV operations in July 2012 they were able to work with the police and make 718 arrests and recover £17,000 worth of stolen vehicles.
Many police officers today will openly say that if they didn’t have the backup of the CCTV and the CCTV officers then they would find it a great deal harder to catch criminals and also have the evidence to prosecute.
A lot of people say that the cost of CCTV is crippling local authorities, but let’s have a look a little further into this. The Big Brother watch reports and says that there are now around 51,000 cameras available with councils operating 1000 cameras each. If you were to spend around £500 million that would only put just over 4,000 police officers on the streets, which is nearly the whole of the Northumbria force.
The figures say it all, CCTV is not only cost-effective it’s also working 24hrs and able to help with face and number plate recognition. In today’s crime fighting world it is invaluable. It has become so valuable even the average Joe is having CCTV installed in their house to ward off suspecting criminals from breaking in.
One industry taking full advantage of what CCTV has to offer is the bar and club industry, due to the fact that they can include face recognition. This helps them reduce the amount of known troublemakers getting into their establishment and also allows the clubs to bar particular people thus being able to control who is coming in and out of their clubs.
The truth is that in this day and age we would be in a state of disarray if we didn’t have any CCTV in place; it would make the police officers work ten times harder, the evidence to convict would not be as good, not to mention that fact that the UK riots would have more than likely gone on for months and not just days.
