[Effect of urban closed circuit television on assault injury and violence detection 2003; 9: 312-16]
Closed circuit TV surveillance does not prevent street violence in town centres, but it increases police detection rates, reveals a study in Injury Prevention. And it reduces the severity of injuries sustained, the study shows.
The researchers assessed police reports of street violence from 1995 to 1999 in five randomly selected English towns and cities in which CCTV surveillance had been installed in 1997, and five in which it had not.
The locations covered by surveillance included Ashford, Eastbourne, Lincoln, Newport in the Isle of Wight, and Peterborough. The five areas without surveillance included Chelmsford, Poole, Derby, Scarborough, and Huntingdon.
Over the same period, they checked all emergency department attendance records for the treatment of assault in the same locations.
In the surveillance towns and cities, overall, the numbers of people requiring emergency care for injuries sustained during assaults fell by 3%, and the numbers of violent offences detected by the police rose by 11%.
In the towns and cities not covered by surveillance, the number of violent assaults requiring emergency treatment rose by 11%, but the numbers of incidents detected by the police remained the same.
These results suggest that CCTV surveillance does not act as a deterrent, say the authors. If it did, police detection rates would have fallen. But the fall in the number of assaults requiring emergency treatment indicates that the footage prompts swifter police intervention before an incident or argument escalates, they suggest.
But they point out that the figures highlight the inadequacy of police crime figures, which clearly do not reflect the full extent of street crime, as evidenced by the emergency medicine department figures.
Click here to view the full paper:http://press.psprings.co.uk/ip/december/312_ip2220.pdf
RSS