ABSTRACT
Closed Circuit Television Cameras (CCTV), in short, looks set to become a fifth utility, to join electricity, gas, water, and telephone networks as ubiquitous infrastructures that we expect to cover all places and therefore largely take for granted. CCTV covers so many of our town and city centres, shopping malls, petrol garages, leisure centres, stadia, car parks, transport networks, residential and public spaces that, soon, virtually every part of our waking hour will be watched, somewhere, by someone. In smaller towns, CCTV control centres in one town are being linked to new CCTV systems covering other market towns in the surrounding region to save money. More and more of the nation’s, indeed the world’s, criminal acts are caught directly on camera as they happen. The recent installation of CCTV in Chapeltown, Leeds, was prompted by the murder there of Stefan Popvich in 1996.
