Visto en Flickr:
Brick Lane by CCTV. There’s more CCTV cameras on the Brick than there is rubbish bins. And we’ve got photos of them all.
La imagen en Flickr tiene notas con enlaces a fotos de cada una de las videocámaras de esta calle del East End londinense.
El programa de periodismo de investigación Newsnight de la BBC ha investigado a más de 100 autoridades locales del Reino Unido para averiguar cúantas cámaras de videovigilancia existen en UK.
De la investigación han salido un buen montón de gráficos y de datos interesantes:
Se estima que en la ciudad de Londres existen entre 400.000 y 500.000 cámaras de videovigilancia, entre las manejadas por la policía y por empresas privadas. En The Guardian han accedido hasta uno de los centros de control de estas videocámaras, la del Westminster Council, en la que 48 pantallas bajo Piccadilly Circus controlan todo lo que sucede en ese sector de la ciudad.
“We’ve got cameras everywhere,” he said. “We can pretty much see everything.”
“To be honest with you, the novelty wears off pretty quickly,” Brown said. “It’s just a job really, at the end of the day – you tend not to watch too much TV when you go home.”
A priority is to seek out potential terrorists on reconnaissance missions, and the operators repeatedly zoomed in to unsuspecting tourists snapping London sights.
Most images are stored for 31 days although, he said, police ask for some to be stored for “a long time”. He declined to say which images, why or for how long.
A joint Home Office and police report recently found 80% of CCTV pictures are of such poor quality they cannot be used for detecting crime, and a police surveillance expert estimated last year that just 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV.
Defending the searching gaze of London’s cameras, Ingledew said that people who do not look as though they are doing anything wrong will be left alone.
Behind his back, an operator watched two men in bomber jackets talking animatedly inside a telephone box. Another operator watched a young couple gazing up at Nelson’s column.