I LOATHED CCTV, BUT NOW I KNOW THAT IT’S VITAL

AS someone who once wrote a book condemning the surveillance society, I have to admit the story of Wayne Couzens makes salutary reading. Without CCTV, he might never have been caught for the vile kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard earlier this year.

Officers managed to track this monster’s movements thanks to hours of ‘dashcam’ footage from cars and buses, footage from shops and cafés and new doorbell cameras attached to people’s homes.

Combined with other technology such as number plate recognition software and mobile phone ‘triangulation’, it made for an unequivocal case.

Without it, Couzens might not have pleaded guilty and instead inflicted on Sarah’s family the additional torment of a lengthy trial. Sentencing him to spend the rest of his life in prison yesterday, the judge said: ‘The compelling CCTV compilation, the product of 1,800 hours of footage, along with the cell site [mobile phone] evidence, revealed with absolute clarity the core essentials of what had occurred.’

And Sarah’s case is not the only one where such footage may prove vital. According to reports, CCTV footage shows last month’s deadly attack on Sabina Nessa, 28, as well as her movements through the south-east London park where her body was found.

In light of the many such crimes solved thanks to CCTV, fewer people now complain that cameras are a menace that threaten our freedom. That battle has long been lost.

The same is true, I believe, of the DNA database, which in recent years has solved several cold-case murders. The database didn’t exist when Christopher Hampton murdered 17-year-old Melanie Road in Bath in 1984, and for years he must have thought he had got away with the crime. Yet five years ago he was jailed for life after DNA evidence linked him to the scene.

Without CCTV cameras, policing would be put back years and murderers and rapists would be harder to snare. So yes, my thinking on the subject has evolved since I wrote my book The Road to Southend Pier: One Man’s Fight Against the Surveillance Society, back in 2007. For one thing, the technology has improved massively. My chief bugbear back then – I never was so concerned abut people having their ‘privacy’ infringed when they were caught on camera in a public place – was that officers and security guards were being ditched in favour of CCTV cameras that didn’t even work.

At that time, four out of five CCTV images requested by police and the courts in the UK proved to be useless because they were too fuzzy, the cameras were pointing the wrong way, they had run out of film or for some other reason. The truth is, there are still problems in this regard, but these are side issues. And while I welcome the technology that allowed police to catch Couzens so quickly, I am not ready to give three cheers to the surveillance society: two is plenty.

I still have deep misgivings about how many of these cameras are being used.

Catching a murderer and rapist is one thing. But just as I warned in my book in 2007, powerful surveillance techniques are still used far too freely to issue automatic fines for the most minor offences. For every Couzens, there are hundreds of thousands of motorists fined for straying into a bus lane, often for just a few yards.

One council, meanwhile, held a trial using DNA from dog waste to fine owners whose animal had fouled public places. Other councils have expressed a desire to use a dog DNA database for the same thing. This strikes me as a horrible misuse of DNA technology.

I accept that CCTV and the DNA database are here to stay, but what we need is a debate on the limits of their use. Without rules, enforcement becomes skewed: police and council enforcement officers tend to concentrate on offences that are easiest to solve, rather than the serious ones.

So let’s have CCTV but forbid footage being used for issuing fines for minor offences. As for the DNA database, I now think we should put everyone on it at birth,but limit its use to investigating the most serious of crimes.