Commentary 2

How do you like to be captured on camera? If your answer is that you love it, how about by 14 cameras? If you still enjoy the attention, how about multiple times everyday, every time you step into the public? Well, even the hottest celebrity will not be able to take that. However, that is what every citizen in Britain goes through everyday. As research shows, one citizen is monitored by an average of 14 cameras, to prevent the committing of crimes, or to solve them. Surely, Britain does have a low crime rate, but is this investment worth what it gives? The maintenance cost of these cameras is extremely high, and costs a lot to keep them in working condition. It definitely reduces the number of crimes, but how effective is it? In my opinion, I feel the cameras are very inessential, and the benefits they bring are of much smaller scale as compared to their cost.


Firstly, the up-keep cost of these cameras totalize to an astonishing amount. By information, one camera takes around 50 dollars every half a year to maintain its condition. For Britain, a country with a population of around 61 million, there would be a very large number of surveillance cameras. According to calculations, Britain has already spent 200 million pounds on the upkeep of these cameras. This is a huge sum of money, which can be put to better use, like being donated to the charities, or build more schools for education, or even simply for improvement of the street lighting. These above alternatives are much better than wasting money filming down daily actions of the people, which data gets deleted every now and then.

Furthermore, statistics proves that the cameras are not utilized to their full potential. Members of the public complaint that the police did not bother to check the CCTV when a crime is committed, and simply goes by the conventional methods of investigating and collecting evidence. This shows that the cameras failed to serve their purpose of solving crimes, and do not speed up the process. According to the article, there is a significant rise in the level of complaints from the public, where it is perceived that police have not viewed CCTV. This number is approaching 100 per year.

However, the cameras definitely accomplished its job of preventing crimes from being committed. Britain saw a drop of 17 percent overall in rape, murder, aggravated assault and robbery, since after they implemented these new technologies. A piece of even more convincing evidence would be Bristol, which saw a drop of 35 percent in crimes across the board. Thus, we can see that the cameras really yielded good results which the Britain police force anticipate, and that it really did bring forth benefits and that the cost spent on it is not totally wasted.

Then again, when we compare between the benefits and the costs, we realize that the costs far outweighs the amount it can save and the benefits that it brings. It is shown that each crime case costs 20 thousand pounds to solve! Now, apparently a normal robbery case, which occurs in the highest frequency as compared to other crimes, is not worth this funding. The lost involved in these cases may range from some hundred pounds to a few pounds, but far from 20 thousand pounds. From this, we can see the inefficiency of this method.

In conclusion, although the presence of the large number of cameras does help in bringing down the number of crime cases, it is extremely inefficient in this context and uses up a lot of unnecessary money which can be put to much better use, and the cons far outweigh the pros. I would not like the day when every action of mine is captured on film, by multiple cameras at the same time, for I know money is being wasted every second that passes.

Commentary 2 Edited

Commentary 2