ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one particular kind of surveillance technology used in crime control, namely visual surveillance technology. It identifies several different kinds of visual surveillance, with a range of crime control applications, and with various consequences for certain societies and for how one can understand the nature of policing, crime control and criminal justice. The chapter examines closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance, and places such analysis within the broader category of 'visual surveillance technologies'. It also examines a range of contemporary visual surveillance technologies, highlighting the capabilities, practices and implications specific to each of the technologies in turn, before identifying and exploring the commonalities of this family of technologies as a whole. CCTV cameras have for many years been the most common, visible and well-known form of visual surveillance technology in the United Kingdom (UK) and many other countries around the world.
