AxeMental wrote:P&P, do you think the cameras in England have made crime less common, or do criminals just adapt?
So you know, I'm a consultant to a local government in Great Britain (specifically Hertfordshire County Council). Presently I'm on secondment working with their Crime and Drugs Strategy Unit.
The fact is that you can't understand crime in the UK without understanding the drugs market, and vice versa.
In terms of acquisitive crime (which includes most home invasions and crimes of property), the vast majority is committed by a very few people. They're the PPO's (Priority Prolific Offenders) and these people have, on average, a crack or heroin habit which costs them about £200 a day.
Because they don't get good prices from their fences, they have to steal about £700 worth of stuff in order to get £200 in cash by the time their dealer comes round to visit them in the afternoon. They generally don't care what they do in order to get that money. Usually they'll cause other damage in addition to stealing (broken windows and stuff) so the real cost to society of a PPO's drug habit is about £350,000 a year. That translates to about half a million dollars per PPO, so PPO's account for the vast majority of crimes of acquisition in the UK. *
As you can imagine, cameras do absolutely nothing to discourage PPOs and they have zero effect on that area of crime.
Other problem crimes, apart from acquisitive crime, are crimes of violence and anti-social behaviour.
Those are mostly related to young people, and in that case the related drug is usually alcohol. Some gang of youths gets drunk and decides to go out and redecorate a few walls in spraypaint and then give someone a Chelsea Smile; this happened to a friend of mine when she was about 26. (She's had plastic surgery since but you can't repair that kind of damage completely.)
Cameras have a noticeable impact on that kind of crime: They make the criminals move somewhere else. The crime still usually happens, though.
Cameras
do help with crimes of opportunity, and they do help people to protect themselves.
Women who're out at night, for example, are well advised to hang around near a camera while they wait for their taxi. The risk that she'll be raped or mugged drops hugely if the criminal knows there's a camera.
But personally, I'm cynical about cameras: I think that the cameras aren't about crime. I think they're about fear of crime. If the public see cameras around, they think they're safer and they think the politicians and the police are doing something proactive to reduce crime in their area.
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* Incidentally, catching these people is actually relatively easy, because they're desperate and not thinking straight so they commit stupid crimes in a stupid way. The problem is that if you catch them, then all that happens is that the dealers drop the street price of crack for a week or so, and all of a sudden there's a whole new crop of drug users committing a whole new lot of offences.
You can also catch the dealers, although this is a lot more effort. The problem is that if you catch them, then all that happens is you get a lot of suddenly very desperate junkies, which leads to a rise in the street price of crack for a week until new dealers step in to fill the gap.
So you have to try to catch the dealers and the users at the same time. It's no easy feat.
The solution's reasonably obvious, isn't it? But the right wing always blocks it when the subject comes up.
