In a bid to combat crime, Britain has made a massive investment in closed circuit cameras – with as many as 4.2 million having been installed.
Yet, the evidence suggests that this may have been for little benefit – with only 3% of street robberies in London being solved with the help of the ubiquitous cameras.
Some suggest that this simply proves the need for more cameras; that it is time to feed the grid into a comprehensive database, to post images on the internet, to use the power of facial recognition technology to spot and track suspects.
Is this an approach that should be adopted in Australia? Or is the consequent loss of privacy worse than the crime such measures are meant to curb?
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