Alan Johnson has today offered us even more CCTV. Because we just don't have enough of it already.
Putting aside privacy issues, which don't seem to interest Johnson or his colleagues at all, I think it irresponsible of senior politicians to ignore the evidence and research in the field about which they're speaking, in attempts to win support at elections - particularly when so doing as an incumbent in the relevant ministry. In this field, all such evidence suggests that CCTV cameras fail to meet any objective test in producing the desired results. As security expert Bruce Schneier has said,
Pervasive security cameras don't substantially reduce crime. This fact has been demonstrated repeatedly... in study after study in both the U.S. and the U.K. Nor are they instrumental in solving many crimes after the fact.
There are exceptions, of course, and proponents of cameras can always cherry-pick examples to bolster their argument. These success stories are what convince us; our brains are wired to respond more strongly to anecdotes than to data. But the data are clear: CCTV cameras have minimal value in the fight against crime.
Cherry-picking is exactly what Johnson tried to do today. He brought a victim of crime with him to the press conference, who spoke movingly about what happened to her, and then expressed the view that CCTV was important in solving her case and that it might not have been solved without it. Perhaps, in this case, it was. But as I've argued here before, both about CCTV and in another context vis a vis Labour's rampant campaign authoritarianism, those who support CCTV often (and, I increasingly think, deliberately) make the mistake of focusing on the specific case in which CCTV might have assisted and say, "there – it’s all worth it". That is to take an emotional position rather than a rational one, overlooking the fact that the millions of man-hours and millions of pounds used in that way might better be spent elsewhere in law enforcement. As we have argued at Big Brother Watch, through our research and our writing, any such rational analysis is against more cameras (and against many of those we already have) rather than in their favour.
Johnson had the gall to say of David Cameron's "Broken Britain" mantra,
"He's used a series of tragic incidents to try and paint the worst possible picture of our society."
At his press conference today, Johnson did just the same, in an intellectually fatuous attempt to elide between the visceral unpleasantness of those cases and the apparent necessity for his pseudo-solution.
Stressing the shocking nature of some examples of the problem you've identified* does nothing to advance the link with the mechanism you're shopping around.
Finally, in his "you can choose to have more CCTV" line, Johnson seems blissfully unaware of the irony - that over many years the government in which he serves has presided (along with its predecessor, to be fair) over an unprecedented explosion in surveillance in which we have thus far been offered no choice at all.
*and presided over
