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The British Journal of Criminology 38:404-428 (1998)
© 1998 Centre for Crime & Justice Studies (formerly ISTD)

RESEARCH-ARTICLE

SEEN AND NOW HEARD

Talking to the Targets of Open Street CCTV

EMMA SHORT and JASON DITTON

Scottish Centre for Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Sheffield

Correspondence to J. Ditton at: Scottish Centre for Criminology, Charing Cross Clinic, 8 Woodside Crescent, Glasgow, C3 7UY

The presence of closed circuit television cameras (CCTV) in town and city centres, mostly with Home Office or Scottish Office support, has grown enormously in the past few years. Analysis of their effectiveness in preventing crime is infrequent, and then usually relies only on comparing police recorded or otherwise reported criminal victimization rates before and after camera installation. It is difficult for this approach to tackle convincingly the possibility of camera-induced crime displacement. This article tries an alternative approach to displacement: asking offenders. To test the efficacy of the approach, an area whose criminal statistical profile had previously been studied intensely—Airdrie, a small town near Glasgow which has one of the first CCTV schemes to be installed in Scotland—was revisited. Thirty offenders (most were then on probation or doing community service) were interviewed and their attitudes to the cameras and to reoffending recorded. Few, if any, clear patterns emerged. Indeed, what is more remarkable is the rich and broad diversity of views, which, in turn, serve to defy any obvious or common-sense categorization of offender reaction to CCTV surveillance.


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