A damning official report into the effectiveness of CCTV has found that 80 per cent of images given to police are not useful as evidence. In fact, it was reported that many CCTV systems are installed without a clear plan of what they will be used for, and users often have no idea of how footage will be played back as evidence in court. Police struggling to deal with the wide range of digital and analogue systems in use around the country have even appointed a specialist team to ‘decode’ footage for playback on Criminal Justice System computers. It was revealed that many of the UK’s ‘public’ cameras, which have cost taxpayers around £200m in the last decade, are not even properly positioned to capture crime effectively. “Much of the CCTV was installed in the 1990s, and any analysis of the siting of cameras may not still be relevant today,” the report says.
I have customers who tell me, point blank, that cctv is useless and a waste of money. When I ask them why, they usually point to the latest newscast or YouTube clip, or (most painful of all) still shot in the newspaper of a robbery or shoting or what have you, and they say "I don't recognize that. It looks like a blob".
Improperly installed and maintained systems hurts the entire industry.
I don't have any constructive criticism to go along with this rant, btw, I just wanted to vent.
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