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Sunday 16 February 2014

CCTV

Olean, New York was the first city in the United States to install video cameras along its main business street in an effort to fight crime in September 1968.

In 1987, Kings Lynn became the first in Britain to install town centre CCTV, though Bournemouth had previously used CCTV in non-central locations.

Britain has 20 per cent of the world's CCTV cameras - one for every 14 of us. (2008)

The single crime most frequently prosecuted as a result of CCTV cameras is men urinating in public on their way home at night from pubs.

The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). The idea behind the design was to allow an observer to watch all inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being observed. Social critics have subsequently used the principle behind Bentham's Panopticon project as a metaphor for the intrusion of modern societies and their pervasive inclination to observe and normalise. The increasing use of CCTV cameras in public spaces is cited as a current example of the deployment of panoptic structures.

The government of China has installed over 20 million surveillance cameras across the country. In 2012, it was reported that more than 660 of the mainland's 676 cities use surveillance systems.

In China, CCTV cameras are so sophisticated that they not only recognize faces, but also walking gait and travel patterns, and can lower credit or charge fines directly to a person’s bank account for misdemeanors or acts such as jaywalking.

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