London is The 3rd Most Heavily Surveilled City in The World

16 comments

1. I’m not particularly bothered by this like some people, but I do wish we actually saw some benefit from it. You’d expect there to be less theft and other opportunistic street crime.

2. Everyone misunderstands this pretty shitty stat.

   It’s cctv. It’s not “cctv operated by the government”, or “cctv that cops can access” or “cctv that is used in investigations”, it’s mostly just random companies with no clear purpose or privacy controls or reasonable use of it.

3. Most private cctv though? With Ring door bells now everywhere its a moot point anyway. 

   In Nice they have signs saying CcTV and microphones listening too. Mindbending shit. 

4. I do have concerns about surveillance over-reach and the effect it will have on personal freedoms, our right to protest etc, but this type of stat almost always counts the millions of private CCTV cameras that are not part of some sort of official network, but are just things like office and shop security cameras, and I expect even things like Ring doorbells get added these days to bump the numbers.

   The old study that got often cited on this topic also picked an area known to be especially camera dense, then took that as the norm and made up the total London camera count as if every square mile had the same number of cameras.

5. Isn’t most of the cameras privately owned and shifty quality anyway?

6. Who am I? Literally just some rando, I’m not a CEO of a powerful company, I’m not a politician nor am I a hooligan looking to stir trouble, so honestly who cares? If there is even an additional 1% chance in helping police investigation then I’m all for it.

7. My question is. How the fuck do they not catch more criminals?

8. In other news, London security guards found to be the third most fattest in the world due to not having to do any walking.

9. What’s the point anyway, London is full of scrotes on electric bikes robbing people in broad daylight, and when you call the police they tell you there’s nothing they can do despite all this supposed surveillance

10. Not enough imo. 

    Also, we need to link these cameras to an AI system that detects and reports crime autonomously and redistirubtes police officers to hotshots where it believes crimes are likely going to occur or are occurring. 

    Even better would be if we automated the police response to armed less-than-lethal drones (with some human oversight). Imagine the response time from incident to a drone being on the scene?! 

    We could reduce crime overnight by 90%.

    Also, it should be able to keep track of known criminals and associates, and ping alerts to law enforcement whenever they get together or are engaging in suspicious activity.

11. Does it count if they’re in 3 pixels per frame though?

12. Makes sense. All that diversity doesn’t come for free.

13. Yeah and majority of them record in potato like quality which makes them absolutely useless.

14. Didn’t it used to be 1st?

15. How much of it is potato quality and/or deleted before the authorities could ever use it?

16. All the CCTV in the world is useless if we don’t have police officers following up on it