Some neighborhoods of London have very nearly saturated their public areas with surveillance cameras.  The excuse why the citizens (or subjects in this case) should pay the enormous costs and suffer the loss of privacy in having those cameras.

So how do those cameras do in doing their stated job of reducing crime?

London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million, figures show today.

But an analysis of the publicly funded spy network, which is owned and controlled by local authorities and Transport for London, has cast doubt on its ability to help solve crime.

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.

In short the cameras aren’t doing a darned thing to reduce crime.  This is one thing that absolutely drives me nuts about government.  They make all these promises, spend all this money and when their projects don’t deliver results nobody is held accountable.