I previously blogged about Prof. Martin Gill’s brilliant talk on CCTV at the Institute of Criminology.

I invited him to give it again as a Computer Laboratory seminar. He will do so on Wed 2006-05-17, 14:15. If you are around, do come along—highly recommended, and open to all. Title and abstract follow.

CCTV in the UK: A failure of theory or a failure of practice?

Although CCTV was heralded as something of a silver bullet in the fight against crime (and by two Governments) scholarly research has questioned the extent to which it ‘works’. Martin Gill led the Home Office national evaluation on CCTV and has subsequently conducted more research with CCTV schemes across the country. In this talk he will outline the findings from the national evalaution and assess the views of the public, scheme workers and offenders’ perspectives (including showing film clips of offenders talking at crime scenes) to show just why CCTV has not worked out as many considered. Martin will relate these findings to the current development of a national strategy.