ABSTRACT
It is well known that camera surveillance is extensive in the United Kingdom, much of Europe and increasingly the United States. A popularly cited statistic that was estimated by Norris and McCahill is that the UK may have 4.2 million surveillance cameras and that there may be one camera for every 14 people in the UK (Norris and McCahill 2006: 102).1 These cameras are operated by police, private security firms, local governments, schools, hospitals, parking lots and businesses. They monitor locations such as public streets, intersections, transportation areas, symbolic and other government buildings, entrances to pubs and apartment buildings. Norris and McCahill also estimated the Home Office spent over £250 million of public funds on open-street CCTV between 1992 and 2002 (McCahill and Norris 2002: 22). The EU-funded UrbanEye project tracked the social and political impacts of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) in public spaces in seven European countries (including Austria, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Norway, Spain and the UK) from its development in the 1990s to 2004. In their study of 1,400 publicly accessible spaces (such as shops, transport stations, cinemas and banks) in the capitals of these countries2 in 2002, they found that one-third (29 per cent) operated CCTV systems (Hempel and Töpfer 2004: 3). This trend has also expanded to the United States, with cameras spreading in major city centres from Los Angeles to Chicago. Video surveillance is a rapidly growing segment of the security industry in the US, with projected sales at US$21 billion by 2010 (Bennett 2006, 18; c.f. Willey 2008). As an example of this, it is estimated that US$25 million has been spent on cameras in buses and subway stations in New York City, $5 million in Chicago on 2,000 cameras throughout the city centre and more than $10 million in Baltimore (Associated Press 2006a, 2006b; McCarthy 2007; c.f. Welsh and Farrington 2009). Cameras are not as prolific in Canada, or as studied 123(though see Hier 2010), but the question remains: how extensive is surveillance camera development across this country?
