Why are CCTVs in public places not a thing in America like they are in the UK or South Korea?

Question

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.

In: Other

Answer 1

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.