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Doktor Jons
Guide to Closed Circuit TV (CCTV)

ASSESSMENT OF TOWN CENTRE CCTV SCHEMES

If you want to know how well a CCTV scheme is working, then quite obviously you need to carry out an assessment.
A properly structured Performance Assessment Survey (PAS), may well give an indication as to the apparent effectiveness of an operational CCTV system, but in practice, it may really only tell you part of the story.

The immediate assumption for any camera scheme, is that its design and implementation has been carried out correctly; after all, if a large sum of money has been spent on a 'state of the art' installation, the last thing anyone wants, is someone coming along and pointing out all the mistakes that have been made.

Politicians (in particular) love to champion the cause of CCTV, without really having the remotest idea what it is they're talking about. CCTV is good ..... so we must have more of the same!

Let's take a look at a fairly simple, but hopefully useful comparison; Imagine if you will, that better public transport was proposed for a town, using a significant investment in the very latest design of vehicles.

Let's say £ 20m is spent on buying two seater sports cars (each one capable of carrying a single passenger); alternatively, the same investment could have been used to buy 'bendy buses', each capable of carrying a hundred or more passengers.

They're both 'vehicles', and they both carry passengers, so ..... which do you think offers the more efficient form of public transport?

You probably don't need to be a genius to work out that the buses, probably provide a more efficient transport service, by a factor of around 200:1.

So how exactly does this relate to the current thinking on the widespread use of CCTV in Town Centres, up and down the country.
Well, at the risk of stating the obvious, Doktor Jon might be able to offer a little bit of advice, to anyone either thinking about gathering, or worse still trying to interpret, the raw data on CCTV effectiveness.

Continued >

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