I’ve been watching a lot of South Korean crime dramas lately and it seems like any time there’s a development in a case in any of these shows, the first thing they do is consult CCTV footage. I know the effectiveness of CCTV footage in these shows is exaggerated for dramatic effect, but South Korea \*does\* have a significantly lower crime rate, and I noticed that a lot of surveillance cameras are on the corners of stores or in places that get a lot of foot traffic. I tried googling the answer myself, but almost everything I found was really sarcastic about how CCTVs are useless in places like the UK, which doesn’t answer the question, or people saying how privacy is a basic human right so of course America wouldn’t have surveillance cameras. But the government has been spying on us for decades, anyway, and the Bush administration only made it worse, so I don’t understand why CCTVs seem to be a bridge too far compared to how we’re constantly being monitored on our personal devices, anyway.
I don’t want anyone arguing in the comments about that last sentence, because it’s literally true.
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We do. It’s just done differently. Most large cities have real time analysis cameras that are run by the police department.
The UK doesn’t nearly have as much CCTV as people think it does, London is not the UK.
The reason why London (and other large cities) has so much CCTV is utterly inept police, terrible policies which prioritize reactive policing over active policing and deterrence which were laid out by multiple mayors and governments, no criminal trespass laws and self defense laws that pretty much require you to offer tea and biscuits to anyone breaking in or face prosecution.
There is an undercurrent of distrust of the government in the United States, and it affects us all. It’s caused by inefficiencies and incompetence, but also more prominently by corruption, perceived or otherwise. There are also the feelings left over from the Red Scare, where it was drilled into us that government control was bad, and as such things like cameras on every street corner are just another step on the slippery slope to Totalitarianism.
There is a saying here that the nine most scary words are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
We view things like CCTV this as a violation of our privacy, despite the fact that our laws state that there is no expectation of privacy in public. It’s viewed as a step towards things like China’s social credit system, where its all too easy to silence voices against the government. As well, we don’t want our information being handled by whom we perceive to be idiots.
This is all perception, of course. You’re right that we’re tracked all the time by our devices, but that’s something that people are either ignorant of or ignoring because it’s technically in our control by not using the device. Cameras everywhere are not.
We have plenty of CCTV cameras. I manage security at a small dive bar and we have 16 cameras on the property, covering inside and outside. This is not an unusual or excessive amount by any means. Somewhere like a Target or Walmart will have several hundred cameras and a full time staff dedicated to monitoring them.
Hell, a decent amount of people have Ring or similar video doorbells.
We have CCTV cameras everywhere in the US! And not just in bad neighborhoods or anything; they’re extremely common all over. If your source is TV crime dramas, it seems like American TV cops are always checking cameras from stores and especially ATMs as one of their first go-to moves. I definitely get the sense that Britain has a lot *more*, and I’m sure some of the difference is America’s strong individualist culture, but the UK and South Korea are also much denser countries, so cameras are likely to cover a larger percentage of the area for that reason as well.
They are common place in some places in the USA. For example, Detroit has the “Project Greenlight” program where businesses that put up a city-sponsored and police accessible CCTV camera get priority response from police. This has been going on since 2016. As of 2021 there were 733 cameras, I can’t find more recent data with a perfunctory search.
I’ve literally never worked anywhere that did not have CCTV, and back in school 15 years ago all the way back to elementary school we had cameras. You could walk into the office and the monitor would be there cycling through the different views.
The premise of this question is incorrect.
There are CCTVs everywhere in public places in the US.
The US has the second highest CCTV per capita, just right after China, and 4 times the third contender [Source](https://www.tooltester.com/en/blog/the-worlds-most-surveilled-countries/)
Just because you don’t see them didn’t mean they aren’t there. There are lots of techniques used to make CCTV blend in with the environment so that you don’t notice them.
I think it depends whether the cameras are set up for security or for surveillance, there won’t be cameras recording every alleys like some cities I’ve been in.
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