Surveillance as the Answer to the Crime Essay

Putting this perspective into consideration, most countries especially the UK and the USA have increased surveillance cameras in cities and private buildings. However, recently, there has emerged a debate about whether these surveillance program area helpful or not. This has been prompted by various studies which have confirmed various inconsistencies of surveillance technologies. This paper will, therefore, rotate around the orbit of explaining that greater surveillance is not a popular answer to the problem of crime. First, greater surveillance is intrusive to individual’s privacy. In this regard, therefore, criminals have still been committing crimes such as bombing and kidnapping regardless of whether their images have been tracked by the street cameras or not. Nevertheless, the cameras are not like alarms, they do not make people aware that there is a crime which in progress.

Many people argue that, if cameras alert the makes some sort of sound in such a way they alert the neighbors, they would be very effective. Despite installing the cameras, therefore, people have to take insurance covers Moreover, as far as surveillance cameras may be deemed advantageous in the reduction of crimes, the installation of such cameras is very costly. If one is to install the original cameras rather than dummy ones, it would cost him/her hundreds of dollars. Another reason why greater surveillance is not a suitable solution to the crime problem is that the effectiveness of the surveillance cameras highly depends on other factors such as community involvement and level of monitoring. In some countries, the members of the community argue that increased surveillance is an infringement of people’s rights.

They say that people should not be viewed while doing almost everything in their private things (Bellair, 2000). Again, it is also worth noting that surveillance would not be useful if it is not monitored 24/7. In this case, monitoring refers to the act of ensuring that, there is a person who keeps on checking what is going on in the cameras. Amazingly, in some parts of Scotland, the crime rate increased by 9 % even after CCTV was installed. Along the same line, there has been the argument that, rather than greater surveillance solving the crime problem, it results in what is referred to as the displacement effect. Displacement effect applies to a situation whereby crime in one reduces while increases in another area (Priks, 2014).

In this case, crime decreases in the greater surveillance areas. If greater surveillance could result in a significant reduction in the crime rate, we would have a conclusion it is desirable and also worth the cost. Moreover, just in case they could be caught they used to deny allegations since they were sure that the prosecutors never had enough evidence against them (Dee & Velastin, 2008). Still, greater surveillance deters crime in a sense, the surveillance devices helps in identifying areas with high rate of criminal activities. When these have been identified more security guards are deployed to fight against the criminals. As a result, the criminals fear from committing a crime for fear of being caught. In conclusion, even though most governments have invested highly in ensuring that there is greater surveillance, I support the statement that greater surveillance is not a worthy solution to the problem of crime.