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James Kellerman
You can't go anywhere in London these days without being caught on CCTV camera. Buses, Trains, shops streets and buildings all sport these eyes. They don't provide any active security, a camera can't intervene in a mugging, but the proponents argue that they are useful at solving crimes. It looks as though the statistics tell another story.
London has spent £200 million installing 10,000 CCTV cameras, and yet the proportion of crimes solved is going down, not up -- and some boroughs with the more cameras have the worse crime-solving rates.
• There are now 10,524 CCTV cameras in 32 London boroughs funded with Home Office grants totalling about £200million.
• Hackney has the most cameras - 1,484 - and has a better-than-average clearup rate of 22.2 per cent.
• Wandsworth has 993 cameras, Tower Hamlets, 824, Greenwich, 747 and Lewisham 730, but police in all four boroughs fail to reach the average 21 per cent crime clear-up rate for London.
• By contrast, boroughs such as Kensington and Chelsea, Sutton and Waltham Forest have fewer than 100 cameras each yet they still have clear-up rates of around 20 per cent.
• Police in Sutton have one of the highest clear-ups with 25 per cent.
• Brent police have the highest clear-up rate, with 25.9 per cent of crimes solved in 2006-07, even though the borough has only 164 cameras.
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