Over the top: Houston chief wants cameras in apartments, private homes : Houston Indymedia

Houston police chief Harol Hurtt has a delusion -- several, actually, but the one I'm referencing at the moment is his notion that installing surveillance cameras will help Houstonians feel safer and reduce crime. Hurtt not only wants to put cameras in public spaces downtown, he also wants to force new malls and apartment complexes to install camera systems with direct feeds to the police department as part of the building permit process, maybe even in private homes.

As for privacy, Hurtt told reporters, "If you're not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?" Uh, because you respect the Constitution and personal liberty, maybe? The KGB used that same line in Communist Russia, one recalls, on their way to filling up a system of gulags.

Beyond privacy concerns there's a bigger problem: empirically cameras simply don't reduce crime. London, England today is the most surveilled city in the world. You supposedly can no longer walk outside in London without your image being captured by police on CCTV, or closed circuit television, as the Brits refer to it. Those cameras were installed in reaction to IRA terrorism, and are as integrated into their day-to-day police practices as any city in the world. Their cops have invested a lot of capital, political and monetary, into promoting them.

Facts are facts, though, and when the British Home Office (that nation's top law enforcement agency) last year released a long-term study on the topic, it revealed that surveillance cameras didn't reduce crime, confirming previous research. Reported the 2-24-05 London Evening Standard:

The findings [came] as a blow to the Home Office, which has trumpeted CCTV as a key crime-fighting weapon for the past 10 years.

The report's author, Professor Martin Gill of the University of Leicester, said: "For supporters these findings are disappointing. For the most part CCTV did not produce reductions in crime and did not make people feel safer."

The only one of the 14 schemes found to be a success was targeted at car parks, where it led to a significant drop in vehicle crime. Other schemes in city centres, residential areas and hospitals produced no clear benefits.

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