Sir, – It is worrying to note from recent correspondence the casual acceptance of the deployment of CCTV technology ("CCTV, data privacy and illegal dumping", Letters, March 27th). This is particularly so when there is little or no evidence that CCTV reduces crime and certainly not to the extent that justifies the risks to civil liberties involved.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has found that video surveillance has not been shown to be effective “at preventing or reducing criminality” while it raised serious concerns regarding the inevitable erosion of the right to privacy and the potential of such systems to be abused.
On the latter point, studies in Britain concur, finding that people “caught on CCTV deemed to be out of time and place with the surroundings” were subjected to prolonged unjustified surveillance. In addition, while Londoners are under greater surveillance than anyone else in the democratic world, all studies – from academic criminologists to the Home Office – found that such surveillance has little or no impact on the crime rate there.
At best, “it has a displacement effect – moving crimes from where the cameras are to where they are not”.
Like any intrusive technology, the benefits of deploying CCTV must be balanced against the dangers. An ACLU study found that CCTV technology “has the potential to change the core experience of going out in public, carries very real dangers of abuse” and “mission creep” and its “benefits are hard to find”.
Civil liberties, once lost, can be very hard to recover. – Yours, etc,
JIM O’SULLIVAN,
Rathedmond,
Sligo.