STEPHEN GRAHAM

The fifth utility

An initiative begun in Britain is taking hold across the
developed world: building CCTV into construction plans is
becoming as normal as incorporating running water

6~"^7"ou're under CCTV surveillance' signs are everywhere these days.

X But these might soon be replaced by signs that say 'Warning! You
are entering an area which is NOT covered by CCTV!'
So widespread is CCTV coverage becoming, and so reliant are we on
the gaze of millions of electronic eyes, that we may soon start to treat the
absence or collapse of CCTV systems with the same fear and anxiety
with which we treat electricity cuts or the collapse of the phone
network. We might soon have a fear of unwatched spaces. 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.
How can we tell that CCTV is on the verge of omnipresence? I
would point to four early signs. The first and simplest is its widening
geographical coverage. CCTV now covers so many of our town and city
centres, shopping malls, petrol stations, leisure centres, stadia, car parks,
transport networks and residential and public spaces that soon virtually
every part of our waking hours will be spent under surveillance.
In 1999, 500 British towns and cities had public CCTV systems - up
from 74 in 1996 — and the expansion rate is remarkable. The British
CCTV market is currently the biggest in Europe at over .£385m
(US$616M) per year.
Once established, CCTV systems generally add cameras to cover
larger areas on a continuous basis to make the most of the investment in
people and technology. Within cities like Newcastle-upon-Tyne, for
example, separate systems now cover the city centre, main shopping
malls, district centres, business parks, transport networks, stadia and a

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STEPHEN GRAHAM

growing range of housing and residential districts. The uncovered space

between these areas is diminishing fast.
Beyond the main towns and cities, there is a notable shift of CCTV
towards smaller and more remote rural areas. Smaller settlements,
worried by fear of crime and potential overspill from urban areas with
CCTV, are installing their own systems. In Wales, a progressive diffusion
has led to Cardigan, with 4,000 people, and Newcastle Emlyn, with
1,500, now having CCTV.
The second sign is that the growth of CCTV is fuelling itself in a
spiral of self-reinforcement. This is happening through its symbiotic
relationship with television. More and more of the world's criminal acts
are caught directly on camera. Soon after, they are beamed direct to our
living rooms through the countless news reports and cheap crime shows
that flood TV, from Police Stop! to America's Dumbest Criminals. Even
local newspapers are now keen to print CCTV images of convicted
criminals' faces. The deputy editor of one such paper, the Portsmouth
Evening News, believes this is 'part of what makes CCTV effective'. Ade
Thomas, a former researcher for the civil liberties group Liberty, argues
that this close connection between TV, local news and CCTV is
accelerating the shift to ubiquitous surveillance. Viewers react to crime
shows by developing further anxieties about the risks of crime. In
response to these anxieties, they are likely to support the extension of
CCTV Thus, more and more crime events will be captured to be
relayed on to TV programmes. And so the spiral continues.
The third sign is more subtle. Over the past few years, attention in
the British media has started to shift from watched places to unwatched
ones. As part of this process of what sociologists call 'normalisation',
every murder, school break-in or terrorist act intensifies the demands for
surveillance. The question, especially in the local and tabloid press, has
shifted from 'Are these new CCTV schemes a good thing?' to 'Why
can't we have cameras everywhere?'
Take a couple of examples. The recent installation of CCTV in
Chapeltown, Leeds, was prompted by the murder there of Stefan
Popvich in 1996. Local councillors were criticised for not installing the
system before the murder, to either deter it or help detect the culprit.
And when cameras were removed from Ladyton shopping centre in
Scotland a few months before a murder there in 1996, the local press
reported this 'video blunder' in more detail than the murder itself.

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It seems the newsworthy events emerge not when another CCTV

system is installed or when CCTV images are used by the police or
private security personnel. Rather, media and public attention is on the
dangers and threats that lurk in unwatched places, either when camera
systems fail, or when serious crime occurs in the interstitial, uncovered
spaces between existing CCTV systems.
The final ominous sign of the shift to ubiquitous surveillance comes
from the remarkable technological changes under way. CCTV is starting
to be computerised. This shift to digital CCTV will have two crucial
consequences. First, it will remove barriers to geographical expansion.
This is because digital CCTV systems can be programmed to
automatically search for specified events and people within much larger
systems than are currently possible, rather than relying on the built-in
limits of the 'Mkl eyeball' of the human operator. Second, it is very easy
to link computerised CCTV to databases of car registration plates and
human faces. In other words, technologies for crude visual tracking
quickly become automatic tracking systems which can memorise
movements in time and space as well as tracking them in 'real time'.
In digital CCTV systems, computer programmes stipulate what an
'unusual' event is - say a person running, loitering, or the presence of a
specified individual or car. It then sets the cameras recording, and may
signal an alert to human operators. Early trials for these sorts of
technologies are already in operation, with Britain leading the world.
London's financial district, the City, is encircled by cameras that
automatically scan car registration plates, linking instantaneously to the
computerised records of the Driver & Vehicle Licencing Centre
(DVLC). Suspect vehicles, or cars moving the 'wrong way' down a street
automatically trigger alerts. Alerts sound if cars entering the zone do not
leave within a specified time.
In 1999, the east London borough of Newham introduced a system
that actively scans for the 'target faces' of 600-1,000 habitual and
suspected criminals, 24 hours a day through 140 fixed and 11 mobile
cameras using a software system called Mandrake. The software is based
on a sophisticated 'neural network' programme, that analyses and learns
in a similar way to the human brain.
But the real potential for linking databases to digital CCTV will
come when local CCTV networks start to interconnect into bigger,
national or even international systems. With an effective national CCTV

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STEPHEN GRAHAM

CCTV control room - Credit: Terry Williams /Rex

system it will be very simple for law enforcement bodies to track the
movements of all cars and people continuously and in real time.
Long-mooted national identity cards might in the future provide a
comprehensive database of the population's photographs, although even
now passport agency records have been digitised, and all new driving
licences will require a digitised photograph. However it develops, those
who are not registered within the system - illegal immigrants, for
example - will be easy to isolate as 'unknowns' within databases, and
then track. Movements, activities and behaviours might be archived to
support later analysis of'suspicious' activities. And incidences of crime
might be correlated with people's movements to identify suspects
through 'proactive policing'.

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Paradoxically, CCTV will become less rather than more visible in this
shift towards ubiquitous surveillance. Cameras with lenses mounted
directly on to printed circuit boards already measure little more than an
inch across. Every year the trend is for smaller and cheaper cameras.
They will also become deliberately covert. But in fact the very ubiquity
of the cameras will render them so utterly banal that few will bother to
take much notice (the way we treat phones and electricity sockets now).
Soon we will begin to assume that they are there, embedded in
everything from lamp-posts to clocks, doors, street lights and bus stops.
These trends seem convincing. The CCTV industry itself recognises
the likely emergence of a nationally integrated CCTV infrastructure for
real-time face and car tracking, forged out of the gradual merging of
thousands of individual CCTV 'islands'. Jon Fassenbender, a
commentator in CCTV Today magazine, admitted recently that the full
usefulness of CCTV and facial recognition will only come 'when a
national database is established to provide instant image analysis'. At the
moment, public opinion would probably support such a scheme, but as
Fassenbender himself points out, changing circumstances may force a
rethink: 'At the moment, CCTV is very much flavour of the month.
But what might happen in perhaps ten years' time when most individual
surveillance systems have been gradually integrated towards providing
total coverage, as part of a larger, integrated scheme?' •

Dr Stephen Graham works at the Centre for Urban Technology at Newcastle

University. A version of this article previously appeared in Environment and
Planning B (1999)

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