The future of CCTV

• Published date: 01 February 2019
• Author: Wesley G. Skogan
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12422
• Date: 01 February 2019

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9133.12422

POLICY ESSAY

CCTV SURVEILLANCE FOR CRIME PREVENTION

The future of CCTV

Wesley G. Skogan

Northwestern University

Correspondence

WesleyG. Skogan, Institute forPolicy Research, Northwestern University, 2040 Sheridan Road, Evanston,IL 60208.

Email:skogan@northwestern.edu

Eric Piza, Brandon Welsh, David Farrington, and Amanda Thomas (2019, this issue) present an

updated systematic review of the effects of surveillance cameras on crime. The authors document

the growth of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance and note that the presence of cameras has

become part of everyday life. Observing that the effectiveness of these systems as crime prevention

tools was initially accepted without much real analysis, Piza et al. describe the increasing number

and somewhat greater sophistication of evaluations that have since been conducted to document their

capabilities. They conclude with a careful summary of the circumstances under which the adoption of

CCTV seems to yield crime-prevention benefits.

Only a small section of the Piza et al. (2019) article is focused on the future of CCTV for that lies

beyond its purpose. CCTV's close association with other digital technologies, the explosion in Internet-

connected devices with complementary roles to play in crime prevention, and the rapidly changing tech

world, however, indicates the future of CCTV may be about now, arriving just on the heels of the report

by Piza et al. In this policy essay,I explore the immediate future and discuss an expansion in the scope of

what CCTV looks like, focusing on a shift toward “proactivity” on the part of increasingly autonomous

cameras; the growing number of license plate readers and linked traffic cameras; and emerging roles

for drone cameras. Further into the future lies the most transformative CCTV technology of them all,

facial recognition. What is stressed throughout is the importance of the increasingly integrated sensing

and information processing network into which they feed, known more generically as “the Internet of

Things.”

1CCTV GOES PROACTIVE

One key finding of the Piza et al. (2019) article is that “actively managed” CCTV systems are more

effective. Passive systems are mainly useful for generating forensic images, one that can be used after

the fact to identify possible offenders and offense details after an incident is reported by the victim

or otherwise comes to light. Actively managed systems, on the other hand, require that someone is

watching. This might be a security guard assigned to a parking lot or a team gathered around a wall

of screens at a centrally managed facility. Employing people to watch screens to mobilize a rapid law-

enforcement response obviously costs a lot more than does passivelyrecording possibly useful images

Criminology & Public Policy. 2019;18:161–166. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp © 2019 American Society of Criminology 161