CAMERA’S ON, BUT SO WHAT?
Hardware alone can’t fix crime woes
It was back in April, after a fatal shooting outside of the BareFax club, that people in the ByWard Market started to talk seriously about cameras — lots of cameras.
Last month, Mayor Jim Watson wrote to city manager Steve Kanellakos suggesting a three-year pilot for cameras in “targeted areas of criminal activity and high pedestrian visibility.” Watson also spoke out publicly in favour of surveillance cameras in the market after two shooting deaths in the tourist area on June 10 and July 1. Ottawa police laid murder charges in each of those cases.
The surveillance cameras, to be mounted in a network all around the market, include technology that goes far beyond traditional crummy convenience store cameras and their grainy images.
Modern closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras can talk to each other, linking together to follow a person or a car down the street, block after block. They can detect gunshots automatically and send instant alarms.
Newer technology includes “computer vision technology” which automatically picks out visible “images of concern” such as firearms, fugitive vehicles or actions such as repeatedly hitting a window.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has promised $3 million to the City of Toronto for surveillance cameras there. Large numbers of surveillance cameras are expensive, and in Ottawa, Watson has started asking what they would cost.
Then there’s the key question of whether these cameras are actually effective.
Britain has flooded its urban streets with an estimated four million cameras since the 1990s — one for every 16 people in the country. Years of study are now showing that the system works in some ways, but fails entirely in others.
Most importantly, an analysis this year that sums up decades of separate studies concludes there were “no significant effects observed for (preventing) violent crime.” The meta-analysis is by Brandon Welsh, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston, and David Farrington of Cambridge University, publishing in a journal called Criminology and Public Policy.
Welsh said cameras create a feelgood factor.
“There is this panacea view of cameras that has caught on,” he said in an interview, “especially since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, here in the U.S., and subsequent bombings in the London Underground.… It has led to the view: Let’s just put cameras up and that will solve everything.”
They do prevent crime in some settings, he said. “The setting where cameras are most effective is in car parks” (i.e. both open parking lots and garages), and they also help to protect homes from break-ins.
But they do nothing to prevent violence. “Surveillance cameras do not deter individuals from committing acts of violence,” he said.
There is this panacea view of cameras that has caught on, especially since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.… It has led to the view: Let’s just put cameras up and that will solve everything.
That’s not to say they are useless in violent incidents. In Wales, one group has found that CCTV allows police to respond quickly to fights, before they escalate and someone is killed.
“They found that the severity of violence was lessened” as police break up fights “or get there before a knife comes out or before some other weapon was involved. So the emergency room data showed that the severity of injuries was much less severe,” Welsh said.
But “you can’t just say that the cameras did that. It was how the cameras were operationalized,” he said, meaning how humans watched the monitors, relayed information and scrambled police to the scene.
This emphasizes that it’s not enough to put up cameras. You need human eyes on their images, all the time.
“Actively monitored CCTV schemes evidenced significant reductions in (property) crime, whereas passively monitored schemes were not associated with reductions in crime. This finding provides evidence against the use of CCTV as a stand-alone tactic,” Welsh and his team wrote.
No one knows why cameras don’t stop violence, but this theme runs across dozens of studies on different continents dating back to the 1990s.
Authorities in Britain are well aware of the limitations of surveillance.
An agency of the government of Scotland summarized the pros and cons of CCTV back in 2009, concluding that “CCTV is generally most effective in deterring acts of property and vehicle crime, and has virtually no impact on deterring violent crimes.” It noted “CCTV is more effective in terms of crime deterrence in Britain, than North America.”
The agency added that “unless publicity and media coverage of CCTV cameras is maintained, then any initial deterrence effect tends to fade with time.”
“That I suspect is correct,” Welsh said of the agency’s findings. “There is this decay effect over time,” he said, possibly because people become more familiar with it but also because equipment can break down or funding for monitoring can be cut, and the network becomes less effective.
The Scottish analysis also dealt with information from actual murderers who were gathered in focus groups. These killers agreed that cameras don’t prevent violence: “With regards to the murders committed, most of the participants were of the view that even if cameras had been there, it would not have made much difference. One said ‘ … coming out of clubs when you’re all tanked up and that, you don’t even recognize the cameras are there. I mean, when I got arrested for my offence, I didn’t even know there was a camera there.’
“This raises two issues: firstly, that when alcohol is involved and all sense of judgment is impaired, the potential deterrent impact of CCTV is automatically diminished; and, secondly, that public space cameras, such as those outside nightclubs, may largely go unnoticed either due to the effects of alcohol, or perhaps through a lack of advertisement and public awareness.”
Yet cameras remain a growth industry, especially in Europe.
Séverine Germain of the Grenoble Institute of Political Studies in France calls the popularity of surveillance cameras “a paradox: video surveillance becomes widespread, in more and more numerous social and national spaces, while its effects in terms of crime prevention and/or law enforcement and community reassurance are not demonstrated.”
She and two colleagues add that agencies find new ways to use surveillance technology, “and progressively acquire its multiple uses that then become justifications for its use, fuelling the buyin process.”
British authorities also recognize the feeling of safety that comes from CCTV.
“CCTV has been accredited with mythical powers in reducing crime and the fear of crime, and thus with creating a ‘feel good factor’ amongst the general public,” wrote William R. Webster of the University of Stirling back in 1996.
Paradoxically, however, the people who report feeling safer with CCTV are mostly those who felt safe in the first place. The Scottish government analysis concluded that this technology “is not making the unsafe feel safe, it is making the already safe feel safer.”
The cameras do help convict a criminal after the fact. One of the best-known examples is the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013 where cameras recorded the Tsarnaev brothers at the crime scene. Another is the kidnapping and murder of Tori Stafford in Woodstock, captured by a high school surveillance camera as she was led away by Terri-Lynne McClintic in 2009.
The Scottish analysis says that “police largely view CCTV as a useful time-saving tool that supports their work in a variety of ways,” mostly because pictures can help identify criminals.
“The most striking finding from police interview data … is the considerable amount of time that can be saved during the investigation process due to the use of evidence found in CCTV footage. This is predominately due to an increase in early guilty pleas in the face of strong video evidence,” it says.
“We know that from the police … so certainly there’s some utility to cameras,” Welsh said. But he said it’s crucial to have foot patrols of police or security guards or both so that cameras are a tool rather than the whole solution.
He suggests Ottawa should do a cost-benefit analysis. “Ultimately we should be mindful of the financial costs and also ... it seems rather important especially with taxpayers’ dollars that we have a sense of: Is the public receiving benefits from this?”
Also, are these costs sensible when compared to other anti-crime measures?
“The cost can be quite exorbitant and might limit one from investing in other areas (while) not getting the return for one’s investment.”
In 2005, the City of Glasgow installed 871 cameras, paying on average £23,132 (about $37,500) to buy and install each camera and £3,911 a year ($6,300) to operate each one. (Installation cost varied enormously by area — from $8,000 to $46,000 apiece, with lower costs where there were many cameras close together.) The total cost was about two million pounds ($3.25 million), plus operating costs.
Josiah Frith runs the Humble and Harris hair salon on Cumberland Street, and is chair of the ByWard Market Business Improvement Area.
“Our primary concern is people’s desire to come down here,” he said. “I live in the market as well. I have a young family, two small kids, so safety is our utmost concern.
“Anything we can do to try to improve that (safety), we’re going to do.”
Although talks of CCTV cameras in the market have not yet reached the stage of firm plans, Frith and others are hoping the cameras would act as one more tool in the anti-crime tool box.
“The message from police has been: ‘Is it going to stop crime?’ No,” he said. But police have told local business owners that cameras can help them catch criminals after the fact, and they are one way of getting past the problem of witnesses who won’t say anything.
“So does that make everybody feel safer? Yeah, I would think so. If there’s just a bit more friction for somebody in committing a crime, I think that’s worth it.”
But he cautions that cameras alone are not the whole answer. The area still needs police on the scene, he said, and needs more social programs focusing on transient people and drug addiction.
The public doesn’t seem to mind being watched, at least not when we are out in public. People and governments will gripe about Facebook or Google watching us, but we don’t give CCTV a second thought. If anything, the public has historically supported CCTV as a crime-fighting measure.
The American Civil Liberties Union doesn’t mind cameras that target high-crime areas, but it does worry about the potential to put cameras everywhere, watching everyone. And it says that terrorists, who are often used to justify surveillance in the United States, aren’t bothered by surveillance because they often want to be seen.
The ACLU says in a position statement: “This technology (a) has the potential to change the core experience of going out in public in America because of its chilling effect on citizens, (b) carries very real dangers of abuse and ‘mission creep,’ and (c) would not significantly protect us against terrorism. Given that, its benefits — preventing at most a few street crimes, and probably none — are disproportionately small.”
Back in ByWard Market, Frith has been around long enough to take the long view of life, of crime, of changes.
“I’ve been living down here in the ByWard Market for 20 years. It ebbs and flows.”
There are always new measures to try, he said. Closing William Street has cut down trespassing and petty crime, he feels. “It’s kind of cool: You try little things, see how they work, and try something else.”
This newspaper asked Jim Watson’s office whether he would be influenced by research indicating cameras don’t prevent violent crime. Staff sent this reply: “Mayor Watson supports exploring the installation of CCTV cameras in the ByWard Market to enhance the sense of safety among the public and to improve the ability of the Ottawa Police Service to respond to crime. As such, Mayor Watson has asked staff to prepare a report that will be brought forth to council later this fall.”