Dennis Bailey at the Open Society Paradox calls me out on yesterday's Grits post about surveillance cameras, and offers up examples of surveillance "sucess stories." To me, the wisdom of proliferating security cameras should be evaluated based on the empirical results of a three-way tradeoff between security, liberty, and measurable, real-world effectiveness. So I'm happy to see his set of success stories. Taken together, the two posts supply readers with a pretty good range of cases documenting both risks and benefits, pros and cons of camera surveillance.
Some of his examples are private surveillance, not government, which is a different matter, though when enacted on a large scale, it too deserves scrutiny. I don't know anybody, though, who thinks there shouldn't be a camera behind the counter at the convenience store. Still, even in his other examples, serious crimes were committed in the cameras' presence, though perhaps it was easier to prosecute crooks (unless, I suppose, they operated at night or wore a hat).
Earlier I'd cited longitudinal research showing widespread use surveillance cameras doesn't reduce crime. They've been used long enough in Britain now to allow extensive analysis of the resulting crime data.
So Dennis' post got me wondering why, despite its internal logical consistency, the idea of camera surveillance reducing crime never played out that way in the real world in Britain where it's much more widespread (except in a few specific places like parking facilities).
A hypothesis:
1. Human beings are creative and criminals actively try to get around or disable surveillance.
2. Police have limited resources.
3. If cameras are being monitored, police resources are being directed wherever the cameras are being focused. I'm not just talking about time spent by the video-monitor watchers, but where patrol units are sent to respond. By definition, that excludes every other portion of the world where they aren't looking, which is inevitably SOMEWHERE (or if cameras are everywhere, then you get lapses like in the Atlanta case), so because of (1) above, criminals are inevitably able to adjust to the new environment.
For example, take a look at this typical quote from one of Dennis' examples from a Washington state police chief: "I can have one person watch 11 monitors, whereas I would have to have 11 officers patrolling to see the same things." But that's not true, because what that officer is doing is DIRECTING the other officers, who must respond if the first one sees anything. More to the point, over time officers will be more likely to be directed there, so cameras represent an unplanned overallocation of the state's limited policing resources.
If that's true, then the reason camera surveillance doesn't reduce crime might be that the theory of cameras as a crime preventive fundamentally misunderstands both crime, and the way cameras usurp human police management decisions by overallocating scarce officer resources. If I'm right, in the end, at best, cameras target only the most stupid criminals, for a while.
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