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Comment by thejackgoode | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: London has ~700k cameras and is top 3 in the world by cameras per capita, top 20 being almost exclusively Chinese cities

https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...

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It's worth noting the majority of cctv cameras in the UK are privately owned, watching over private property, not owned by the state. So you can assume a) they're not actively monitored b) recordings are stored only for short periods of time (and retained only in event of a crime)

Don't get me wrong, UK has a strange fixation with CCTV. But I wonder how these figures would look if you excluded privately owned cameras

Edit: more information here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Uni...

Exactly, literally every time I see these articles I just think of the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...

I remember being questioned on terrorism charges outside St. Pauls Cathedral, alongside my friends by about 20 police with 4 vans. They told us that we need to leave London (lived outside of it) and they will watch us to ensure that we leave, if we do not then there will be further problems for us.

What did you do to elicit that response?

1. How can you say this without giving more context?

2. Presuming you aren't a terrorist or doing something so almost terroristish you were violating a public order statute - why wouldn't you just refuse?

Terrorist Police in London just hit a little different. Machine guns, 5 police to 1 person, all separated apart. Refusing to do so was just not worth the back and forth, generally speaking we would have given them a hard time.

But essentially we were out for a road trip and a friend of mine happens to be a videographer. We were around St. Paul's later at night with 2 cars a few guys and a couple of ladies. My friend was filming the Cathedral and a patrol drove passed and turnaround. They asked to see what was on video, they saw it, a couple of friends turned into deer in headlights with their responses and that's when they called backup.

I tried to keep the producer which they gave me with all the details etc but haven't been able to find it. Odd experience. I couldn't be any lesson 'terrorist' looking if I tried.

>London has ~700k cameras

A fact that often scurries across my mind when I read about some crime caught in 4k (especially home security cams) for which the police are unable to find the culprits. Are all those cameras actually on?

They are but if they use them all the time people won't be able to put them out of their mind and ignore them. So they only use them when it's politically convenient

You think all these cameras would have a positive effect on the crime index. London is just average compared to other European cities, so you might just want to skip spending billions on surveillance in the first place.

https://www.numbeo.com/crime/region_rankings_current.jsp?reg...

>Is this much less accurate than governmental statistics?

In some countries, governments have a detailed statistics based on a number of reported crimes per capita. Those surveys are particular good in comparing crime between two cities in that country, but are not so good in cross country comparison for the following reasons:

By its own admission this isn't a good metric

True, it depends on individual methods for data collection. Still, there should be some evidence for the effectiveness of video surveillance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_London doesn't really reflect a significant influence. It is falling slightly, just analogous to almost any other European city or capital.

The recent murder of Sarah Everard was solved largely because of CCTV images taken by, if I remember rightly, a bus and a Ring doorbell. Police were able to retrace her movements using those images as reference points and then working backwards to her last known location and forwards to when she encountered her killer (who turned out to be an off-duty police officer). [1]

I think a lot of the time it comes down to resources. For a high profile murder they're prepared to put in the effort. For more minor offences, it's not worth it (to the police, not the same as to the victim)

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jul/09/sarah-everar...

Just Fact, not Fun

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