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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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.
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