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Abstract
In recent years, there has been a marked and sustained growth in the use of closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras to prevent crime in public places in the USA and other Western nations. Amidst this expansion and the associated public expenditure, as well as concerns about their efficacy and social costs, there is an increasing need for an evidence‐based approach to inform CCTV policy and practice. This paper reports on an updated systematic review and meta‐analysis of the effects of CCTV on crime in public places. Evaluations were included if CCTV was the main intervention and the design was of high methodological quality. Forty‐four evaluations met the inclusion criteria. The results suggest that CCTV caused a modest (16%) but significant decrease in crime in experimental areas compared with control areas. This overall result was largely driven by the effectiveness of CCTV schemes in car parks, which caused a 51% decrease in crime. Schemes in most other public settings had small and nonsignificant effects on crime: a 7% decrease in city and town centers and in public housing communities. Public transport schemes had greater effects (a 23% decrease overall), but these were still nonsignificant. Schemes evaluated in the UK were more effective than schemes evaluated in the USA and other countries, but this was largely driven by the studies in the car parks. Implications for policy and research are discussed.
Acknowledgment
This research was supported by a grant from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention to the first author. We thank the journal editor and anonymous reviewers for insightful comments, Katherine Harrington and Mark Mudge for excellent research assistance, and David Wilson and Mark Lipsey for helpful advice on our meta‐analysis.
Notes
1. The original meaning of CCTV was a system of video cameras that were connected in a closed circuit or loop that sent images to a central television monitor or recorder. CCTV has since come to refer to “any form of monitoring system that uses video cameras as a means of surveillance” (Goold, Citation2004, p. 12).
2. It is important to note that none of the sites in the national evaluation were included in the Home Office systematic review.
3. It draws upon a report prepared for the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Welsh & Farrington, Citation2007).
4. Three databases, Social Science Abstracts (SocialSciAbs), Public Affairs Information Service (PAIS) International, and the Australian Criminology Database (CINCH), which were used in the initial systematic review, were not used here because they were no longer available to the authors. In their place, two new electronic databases were searched: Google Scholar and Medline.
5. Information on the unobtainable and excluded evaluations is available from the first author.
6. For a more detailed discussion of the variance in this case, see Farrington, Gill, Waples, and Argomaniz (Citation2007).
7. For a discussion of “benign” or desirable effects of displacement, see Barr and Pease (Citation1990).
8. It was considered necessary to categorize these three schemes separately from the others because of the differences in the settings in which they were implemented as well as their small numbers.
9. In the evaluation of this program, any effect of the police patrols was controlled by using as the before period the 12 months prior to the patrols coming into operation. The police patrols were discontinued at the time CCTV was implemented, so there was no direct influence of the patrols during the after period (Burrows, Citation1980).
10. Fourteen of the 44 studies included in this review were part of this national evaluation of CCTV in Britain.