Why Government shouldn't be let loose with cameras

As I wander round the villages of Bingley Rural, I often hear calls for cameras - whether speed cameras, CCTV or throw-away ones for snapping dog poo. I do understand why people want these things to litter our roads and village centres - people do drive too fast, too often; children do gather "menacingly" outside the co-op, by the war memorial and in the rec; and too many locals seem to think the pavements are provided as a toilet for their pooch.

I've always been a tad cynical about the value of cameras as a means of preventing mildly anti-social and occasionally dangerous activity and I'm sure that cameras affect the way in which people behave. And as Northumbria's then road traffic chief put it:

"Speed cameras don't reduce casualties - they are just for revenue generation. They don't engage and they aren't going to send you a message in the post telling you were driving badly."

The problem isn't that speed cameras don't affect my behaviour - they do - but that their effect on general driver behaviour is erratic and unpredictable. Cameras also have a negative effect on route selection with drivers opting for camera-free routes often involving less safe rural roads or residential streets. And cameras make no allowance for weather, time, road conditions or traffic volumes. But boy do they generate a load of cash!

With CCTV there is silence about the growing evidence suggesting that, not only does the presence of cameras has little or no impact on crime and anti-social behaviour but it may even make our streets less safe. Even the Home Office - CCTV's most enthusiastic advocate - found little or no evidence of the cameras achieving their main aim of reducing crime.

What CCTV does appear to do is make us all feel a little safer, a little less vigilant and still more reliant on fallible technology to do the job of policing out streets. Us Councillors like CCTV because it seems we're doing something - and we get our pictures in the local rag "fighting crime" and responding to local fears!

There is a place for CCTV - it appears to reduce crime in car parks and has some value as a protector of private property. But in public places CCTV has now become almost ubiquitous - making us Brits the most spied on people in the western world. We need urgently to review why we use this camera technology, to look closely as research questioning its value and to reconsider whether intrusive surveillance is really the best way to improve driver behaviour, control anti-social kids and reduce the impact of Saturday night's drunken antics.

I fear that we risk becoming a sad, ineffective and voyeuristic society more interested in technological fixes than human intervention. Our obsession with cameras reflects this - the footage makes great telly but really doesn't reduce crime. We'd be better off investing in better lighting!