Friends of this blog know of my interest in the widespread use of CCTV in the UK. This past week, CCTV was very much in the news when a running camera captured a woman in Coventry named Mary Bale strolling down an ordinary suburban street and picking up an ordinary tabby cat, which she proceeded to drop in a plastic wheelie bin, where it remained for fifteen hours. Bale has been arrested on charges of animal endangerment, which carries a penalty of a year in prison. She has also become a youtube celebrity, and the new face of British evil, all for “a split second of misjudgment that got completely out of control,” as she later admitted. In my mind, the key questions were asked (and answered) in an article in The Independent:
Who actually has CCTV cameras trained on their bins?
More people than you’d think. According to the electrical retailers Maplin, sales of home CCTV equipment jumped by 70 per cent between 2007 and 2008 in the UK’s biggest urban areas. A recent Which? poll suggested 2 per cent of dwellings have CCTV, which translates to an astonishing 300,000. Stephanie and Darryl Andrews-Mann, the cat’s owners, say they installed CCTV outside their house because their car had been repeatedly hit by careless drivers, and the bin happened to fall into its field of vision.
Isn’t CCTV rather expensive?
No. “You can now get a basic one- camera system for £30,” says leading supplier Spy Camera CCTV. Police tell victims of vandalism they are powerless to act without evidence, so are encouraging homeowners to install CCTV. “But you are legally required to put a little sign up saying you have CCTV,” warns the property expert Ross Clark.
Aren’t our streets already littered with CCTV cameras?
There are about four million cameras in the UK – one for every 14 people and reportedly more than in any other country. Privacy campaigners have questioned their efficiency, and a 2008 report by UK police chiefs concluded that only 3 per cent of crimes were solved by CCTV.
So the police don’t actually bother to trawl through all that footage?
Don’t be silly: they’re too busy catching criminals.
