Similar happened in the US with the 9/11 attacks. CCTV cameras captured every one of the hijackers going through security at the airport. While CCTV in both cases provided valuable evidence for investigating what happened, it did nothing to deter the attacks. CCTV might do well for post crime investigations, but there are many conflicting reports about how much they help to prevent crime. This article says that the head detective of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office at New Scotland Yard claims that CCTV was only useful for solving 3% of crimes. Other stories claim much higher, so it's hard to say for sure.


It depends. Most of them I see in Austin are all traffic monitoring cameras tied in with the road monitors to help identify what is causing a traffic jam. These cameras are operated by the state department of transportation, and are the only ones I know of controlled by a government entity outside surveillance of government buildings. This story from 2007 talks about some cameras in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles being operated usually by the local police departments. The NYCLU currently has an open lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security about information regarding the systems in New York, as they worked with the NYPD to design it.


Even the ABC news article I posted above has the same stats in it, so it looks like a lot of places are using it as fact now. Channel 4 FactCheck looked into it and the methodology of where the numbers came from.

CCTV is definitely a useful tool for certain situations. But it's only one of many tools, and I would hope that most institutions using them realize this.