Senior officer says CCTV use "a fiasco"

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's network of security cameras has been "an utter fiasco", failing to cut crime despite billions of pounds being spent on it, a senior detective was quoted as saying on Tuesday.

Britain has the most surveillance in the world, according to civil liberty groups and security experts, with an estimated 4.2 million closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras on buildings, shops, roads and stations.

But the Guardian reported Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville of London police as saying that only 3 percent of the capital's street robberies are solved using CCTV footage and criminals are not afraid of being caught on camera.

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"CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure," said Neville, head of the Metropolitan police's division on visual images, identifications and detections.

"Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court," he told the Security Document World Conference in London, according to the Guardian.

"It's been an utter fiasco."

Neville's comments echo a government report last October which said most CCTV footage is not of good enough quality to help police identify offenders and many cameras are focused on enforcing bus lanes as well as stopping crime.

It said anecdotal evidence suggests that over 80 percent of CCTV images supplied to the police are not up to scratch.