Surveillance: Citizens and the State - Constitution Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)

Professor Clive Norris and Dr David Murakami Wood

28 NOVEMBER 2007

  Q40  Chairman: Are you able to tell us what information there is that CCTV has been as effective in deterring and detecting as was originally envisaged?

  Professor Norris: "Little" I think is the short answer. When CCTV was first introduced in this country, it was not subject to systematic evaluation. It was introduced on the basis that practitioners thought that it was effective. Over the last ten years, studies have been carried out by academics and particularly the work by Jason Ditton in Glasgow and the work of Professor Martin Gill at the University of Leicester, which suggests overall that it has a very, very weak influence on reducing crime. The Gill study was published in 2004; it was the first major Home Office sponsored evaluation. Not only did it show that CCTV had very limited impact in reducing crime but it had very limited impact in reducing fear of crime. The evidence in terms of general reductions in crime and general reductions in fear of crime appears to be very, very weak. There are studies that do show a reduction in specific places. For instance, the same team that looked at Glasgow, the Ditton team, looked at Airdrie and, in Airdrie, they did find a reduction. In Glasgow, they found that crime increased when CCTV was introduced. One further study that is worth mentioning is the Farrington and Walsh meta-evaluation which also found very weak evidence for CCTV as a crime reduction measure; this again was sponsored by the Home Office. If I remember correctly, they suggested at best about a three per cent reduction mainly in car parks and very little evidence that in town centre space you would see a reduction, but that street lighting seemed to be a rather more effective form of prevention.

  Q41  Baroness O'Cathain: I have a very simple question particularly relating to your point about the fear of crime and showing that reductions in crime have not been affected by CCTV. Do you have any statistics at all about the reliability of these CCTV cameras? What proportion do you actually think are working? How many of them break down? Where do the manufacturers get a licence to produce them? Is there a special code or a specification for putting these up in the first place saying that they have to reach certain standards or can anybody string together some sort of camera and pretend that it is a CCTV camera?

  Professor Norris: The answer to the first part of the question as to how reliable they are and whether there are statistics to tell us that, I do not know of any broad-range statistics on how reliable they are. Clearly, if you look at the Gill study of the implementation of range of systems, there were problems with reliability of systems and they were part of it, although I do not think they were necessarily wholly undermining of the systems but there were technological problems. The second part ... ?

  Q42  Baroness O'Cathain: Is there any organisation which actually looks at the manufacture of them, the actual physical specification?

  Professor Norris: Certainly the Home Office has tried to issue guidelines.

  Q43  Baroness O'Cathain: Tried to?

  Professor Norris: Yes. I cannot answer your question with any certainty other than to say that they do issue guidelines as to what would be necessary in the technical sense. I think that the problem is that the range of possibilities is actually rather great, so specifying very exactly in any particular case what you can put in place and where is not such an easy job. One of the problems that has beset in a sense partly the expansion of systems is the problem of inter-operationability: different systems even in the same town and even run by the same council have different technical requirements, they do not integrate properly, and this still besets the industry.

  Q44  Chairman: Do we understand from your answer to the first point of Lady O'Cathain's question that the reports we get in the newspapers of the number of cameras and the number of times we are all photographed are guesses and not based on any statistical evidence?

  Professor Norris: I have to put my hands up to this because I am the originator of both these numbers. The number of 300 times a day that we are captured on film was included in a book I wrote called The Maximum Surveillance Society. Is it a guess, just a guess? I would say that it is a guesstimate. How I came to that figure was that I took a person in London moving around the City from early in the morning until late in the evening and I constructed a journey that intersected with known CCTV systems. So, this was not a fantasy in that sense, this was a journey. I think that I wrote this in 1998, so nine years ago, and I think that the estimate of 300 cameras was perfectly justifiable on what I knew about each of the systems that they intersected with.

  Q45  Lord Rowlands: I am a little surprised by your initial answer because, for example, I travelled in on the number 24 bus this morning and inside the bus was a noticing saying that there was a CCTV camera and that there had been 60 prosecutions for vandalism. If you had polled that bus this morning, I would have thought that the vast majority of us would have said that it was an acceptable form of surveillance.

  Professor Norris: I was not saying that it was acceptable or unacceptable, it was a question of how many there are.

  Q46  Lord Rowlands: Yes, but you also implied that it was of very little value.

  Professor Norris: I am saying that the best scientific evidence that we have does not suggest that CCTV surveillance is very effective at reducing general levels of crime.

  Q47  Lord Smith of Clifton: Was this journey a journey which a number of people make or was it in search of CCTV cameras? Was it a deep search as opposed to a journey from Richmond to the City which a stockbroker might make?

  Professor Norris: It was a busy day in London and it was trying to make a point so, in that sense, it was a piece of rhetoric. However, let us take my journey yesterday from the University of Sheffield to my hotel in London. Every stage of that journey was captured on a CCTV system. My university system captured me; on the bus that I caught to go into Sheffield to get to the station; as soon as I arrived at the station; I was captured when I got off at St Pancras; I was captured when I walked through to King's Cross, I was on their system; I walked into Smith's and I was on their system; I got into a taxi in London and that had a CCTV camera; I got dropped off at my hotel and, as soon as I walked into the entrance of my hotel, I was captured on a CCTV camera.

  Q48  Lord Smith of Clifton: That was roughly 20 times; it was not 300.

  Professor Norris: How many cameras are there? If we talking about the number of cameras that could have seen me, in the Underground there are thousands of cameras; in the stations there are thousands.

  Lord Peston: I would like to ask a technical question following on from Lord Rowlands. Surely on Lord Rowlands' number 24 bus coming down from Hampstead no doubt.

  Lord Rowlands: Coming from Pimlico.

  Q49  Lord Peston: No one at the time you are travelling is a vandal, so that really does not count as evidence. The real point is that the vandals will be getting on later and they are not affected by those cameras. They are drunk, hooligans or what-have-you. Therefore, it is quite compatible that none of you were misbehaving but that the cameras had no impact on those who had a high propensity to misbehave. We do not know that, but we have to do the research and what we are being told is that the research shows that those who have a propensity to vandalise buses are not affected by the cameras. That does not surprise me at all.

  Dr Murakami Wood: It is important to stress that neither Professor Norris and myself would argue that cameras are ineffective at adding to the weight of evidence or being used in court. I do not think we are saying that. The question was about prevention and the claims that were made for cameras when they were first introduced to actually reduce or prevent crime and I think it is quite clear from the evidence that we have seen that there is not enough evidence to suggest that there is any statistically significant effect on the rates of crime or any kind of crime prevention and that is the important distinction. It is up to you to make the judgment on whether that is important or not.

  Q50  Baroness Quin: What evidence is there for displacement? In other words, if you have cameras in one place, crime just moves elsewhere. I can certainly think of an area that I knew quite well where crime was reduced by a very effective if somewhat intrusive CCTV system but at the same time crime rates just down the road rather increased.

  Professor Norris: There is evidence for both displacement and for the halo effect. Certainly from the study in Doncaster conducted by David Skint city centre crime did reduce but it spread to the outer lying townships and there was statistically significant evidence to that effect. There have also been arguments for which you will also find some statistical evidence that, if you put a system in a particular geographical area, it could have effects on the surrounding areas which do not have cameras. Overall, the main level of effect is actually not very much.

  Q51  Lord Morris of Aberavon: Does it not give a perception of safety to people when there are CCTV cameras?

  Professor Norris: If you look at the evidence from the Gill study which is the largest study conducted, a three/four-year study funded by the Home Office employing a large number of researchers, their conclusions were that it did not increase people's feelings of public safety.

  Q52  Lord Morris of Aberavon: It is the perception of people that I am asking about.

  Professor Norris: Your feeling of safety is a perception. It did not increase people's perception that they were safer. In a way, we can see that that has been recognised. The whole of the city centre warden movement to having in a sense a visible authoritative presence on the street that is not necessarily police is about responding to that public demand that what they want is people not machines and technology and it is people who make people feel secure rather than machines.

  Dr Murakami Wood: I have carried out a great deal of work in Japan and it is a useful comparison in this case because Japan is a society traditionally regarded as having a high level of social trust and very low crime rates in comparison to western countries. What I found from talking to people there, especially women—and CCTV is only now being introduced in public spaces with government support—is that, when they saw cameras, they felt less safe and not more safe because that made them think that the area was dangerous, that there was something they should watch out for. Whereas no cameras made them feel their normal level of trust in other people. It really depends on the level of social trust which you have in a society and I think that cameras are probably a mark of the decline in social trust and indeed may increase further that decline in social trust as we rely more and more on technology to replace and compensate for the decline in trust that exists overall in society.

  Q53  Chairman: I have one final question on this before I ask Lord Smith to come in. Are you able to say what the evidence is of the effect of CCTV on detection?

  Professor Norris: The simple answer to that is, "No, I cannot, not with any certainty".

  Q54  Lord Smith of Clifton: What do you see as the key adverse effects of state surveillance? Do they go beyond the deleterious effects on individual privacy?

  Professor Norris: Yes. One needs to think about this mainly in terms of mass surveillance rather than individualised and targeted surveillance. There are four broad issues here. Firstly, there is the issue that mass surveillance promotes the view in a sense that everybody is untrustworthy. If we are gathering data on people all the time on the basis that they may do something wrong, this is promoting a view that as citizens we cannot be trusted, and I think that that is a general issue. A second problem is that once you are into a surveillance solution, it becomes in a sense expansionary to a huge degree. If you see that information is what you need to solve a problem but you do not quite know what that problem is and you do not know what future events you are going to be responding to, the temptation is to collect all information about all people, and that is in a sense partly the way that things have gone. If one thinks about the new criminal records system which will integrate the databases of all police forces including all the intelligence files on 11 million people, I think it is 65 million records that will be integrated, all information comes to bear and then there is the idea that we have to join this all up. So, the information held in health fields, education fields and welfare fields all becomes part of the resource to solving a particular problem. The expansionary nature of a surveillance system is a problem if it does not have checks and brakes to it. The next point relates to what we said earlier. I think that there is an undue faith in technological solutions to the problem of crime, security and order. The best evidence is that order, crime and security are best promoted at a local face-to-face negotiated level. The best way for police to solve crime is if the public give them information freely. It is if the public trust the police that there is that flow. That is about a reciprocal relationship. One of the problems one has with reliance on technological solutions is that we can create a distance between police and public. We can see a police that actually see themselves as standing outside the community and coming down in a sense from the mountain to impose order rather than a police that are an integral part of that community who have to negotiate, sometimes with discretion and toleration, with various communities and individuals but, in that process of trade-off, what one does is build up trust and consent and consent is at the heart. I feel that the faith in technological solutions may actually lead to, in a sense, a shift from one of the fundamental principles of British policing. That would be my third point. My fourth and perhaps actually in a way the most serious issue is that, as one creates a mass surveillance system, as this personal information becomes more and more available, what we are seeing is the idea of risk assessments becoming more and more prevalent in various aspects of certainly criminal justice management but also within education and so forth, and the risk assessment provides the basis for pre-emptive intervention. I think that this is a really serious issue. The issue of course is that we normally talk about intervening with people in the criminal justice sense on the basis of individualised reasonable suspicion. Indeed, the PACE Codes of Conduct actually say that you cannot stop and search someone merely on the basis of a category such as their race. You have to have a better reason than that. Where you collect information and you say that if an individual who in a sense shares the characteristics of other individuals who deviate in some way and therefore are seen as criminal or whatever, that gives us the right to intervene with them and their families with various social programmes, some of which may have punitive elements to them. This seems to change and challenge in some ways and I am not sure that I understand all the ways it does, but ideas of reasonable suspicion and the presumption of innocence, for instance. Something is going on here that I think represents a fundamental shift which our concepts have not quite caught up with. I think that is how I would see the main adverse effects, but again I am particularly thinking about the mass targeted.

  Q55  Lord Smith of Clifton: I would like to press you on this and it seems to me that you began to allude to this. Are there some categories of individuals or social groups who are adversely affected more than others?

  Dr Murakami Wood: First of all, the thing to say is that both ends of the social spectrum, the most wealthy and the worst off, are both subject to high levels of surveillance. There is a big difference. Those at the top end of society tend to get the protective and inclusive benefits of this. This is surveillance that is voluntarily entered into for protection and for social inclusion in volunteering for systems like the iris scanning at Amsterdam Airport to speed you through immigration. You get better security, gated communities and things like that. At the bottom end however, there is significant deleterious effects on people's lives and Clive will detail some of these.

  Professor Norris: If you look at the studies done on the operation of CCTV—and I think this raises one question about all these systems—generally these systems have elements of discretion built into them. They are not just automatic systems following automated routines; they involve people making choices. CCTV operatives have to make choices about who to target and the evidence is that they are most likely to target young males particularly if they are from ethnic minority communities. In terms of the way that that has an impact, actually it is not so much in the public sphere of the town centre, it is more in evidence in the private sphere of the shopping mall with what sorts of people tend to get excluded from those areas. It is not just that they get excluded for criminal infraction, they are getting excluded because youths in a shopping mall are hanging about and they are not shopping and they are asked to move on. If they suggest that they have a right to be there, they are told that they do not. It is private space, so maybe they do not have a right to be there. Then they are excluded. If they argue too much, they will be banned from the shopping centre and the cameras and the security officers will enforce that ban. So, there is a form of exclusion that can go on which tends to target particular social groups and not generally us, as it were. If I may take another example, we have introduced mandatory drug testing in prisons. One of the features of such systems which seem to me to make them at least have elements of fairness in them is that they are random and, when they are random, everyone has an equal chance of being subjected to them. Unfortunately, there is also a little bit that says if a prison officer thinks that you warrant drug testing, then you will get it. This introduces again a human discretionary element to it. What I do not know is the extent to which that may be based on discriminatory bases. We do not know the answer to that question. As soon as you do that, you have that potential. I think that the DNA Register is one where this is really very serious. The over-representation of black men in the DNA Register is a serious issue and cause for concern and part of that over-representation is because they are more likely to be arrested by the police and in some ways that over-representation in arrest statistics may represent an over-representation in certain forms of crime but, in other ways, what it represents, as we know that those people are more likely to be arrested without charge, more likely to be acquitted and so forth, is that there is evidence that this is not just on the basis of good evidence. So, we have a system that is disproportionately including someone on a register which will affect their life chances in ways in the future which is based on forms of differentiation and I have suggested perhaps at times forms of discrimination.

  Q56  Lord Morris of Aberavon: Am I getting the wrong impression? Is it that neither of you are keen on any form of surveillance or is that wrong? In your written evidence, you refer to "the emergence of a `safety state' obsessed with security and stability, and increasingly favouring the precautionary surveillance of groups, categories and individuals ... " What are the main dangers of this kind of approach?

  Dr Murakami Wood: First of all, I think that it is very important to stress that we would never say that surveillance itself is a bad thing. If you read our report which we wrote on the surveillance society for the Information Commissioner, we are quite clear that surveillance is often about the best intentions regarding care and indeed many of our functions in a welfare society would not be able to work without surveillance. Indeed, safety and security of the Realm are also assured by surveillance in many cases. We would like to make it quite clear in the record that we are not suggesting that all surveillance is wrong or that surveillance necessarily has negative effects and Clive will talk about what we mean when we talk about precautionary surveillance.

  Professor Norris: Again, it seems to me that there is this problem of if one is gathering information pre-emptively on a citizenry on the basis that they might commit future crimes, one is widening and changing the nature of the contract. If you look at the document on transformational government, it is clear that what is envisaged is basically a merging of all the data held by government in various forms. Information sharing and taking down the silos are key elements of that report. One of the questions for me here is that we have a regulatory system that has been built up on the principle that you give information for a particular purpose, but you give information in a context and it is to be used in that context. We now have a situation where it appears that what is emerging—and it is emerging—is that the context is merely governance, that you give information at one point of the system. So, as a child you have information recorded about you—I am not sure that you freely give it but it is certainly recorded of you and from you—and that can then become available at another point in the system, a criminal justice context for instance. This seems to be a change in the nature of how we have traditionally thought about information and about the extent to which people have the right to control information about themselves and how it is used. I think that that represents a significant shift. Does that answer your question?

  Q57  Lord Morris of Aberavon: Up to a point only. You mentioned DNA testing. Presumably you would take an adverse view of the collating of information. You mentioned classes of people who will get on that register. What about the balance of advantage which might occur when people who have committed an offence 20 years ago are apprehended on the basis of information that happened to be stored? Would you put the ID card in the same category? Would you put the collating of health information, a study about which a large number of doctors are refusing to take part in, in the same category? Are they all in the same bag, as it were?

  Professor Norris: No. In a sense, I think that the issue of the DNA register raises some very interesting questions. If we are as a society prepared to accept—and we seem to have been—that the police may arrest somebody, not charge them, take them DNA and store it on a register, then I am slightly concerned because actually I think that the issue becomes, if merely arrest is the criteria for being on the register, (1) it gives the police a perverse incentive to arrest people because I think there is advantage to the police for having the register, it has definitely to be shown to be—

  Q58  Lord Morris of Aberavon: An advantage to all of us maybe.

  Professor Norris: But then I think the question becomes, if it is so advantageous, we should all be on the register. That is something that one might have to consider.

  Q59  Lord Morris of Aberavon: Why not?

  Professor Norris: I am not saying "Why not?" I think that is the debate to be had.


 
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