Do technologies such as CCTV and forensics have a preventative effect on crime or do they just increase crime solving afterwards?
Had I to speculate, I’d recall statistics that point out that most violent crime is committed by a relatively small subset of the population. Thus, putting someone away for ten years based on better-quality evidence has the effect of preventing whatever crimes the person was likely to commit over those ten years had he been free.
Fact is, crime isn’t just some random thing that can be expected to affect some percentage of the population regardless of age, sex, education, socioeconomic class, etc. I don’t see how identifying and convicting career criminals can have anything but a preventative effect, at least in the short term.
Ah good point. Thanks Bryan Ekers.
I doubt that your average criminal has a very good idea of how forensic science works. So I am guessing that it has no effect on crime rate.
Well I don’t know how good an idea anyone has but there are various programmes like CSI on television that lead people to believe that forensics can be used to find out an amazing amount of things. I’m sure criminals watch television too.
I’m thinking back to programs like Dragnet, which ran from the 40s through the 60s on radio and television. They implied that the police would go door-to-door throughout all Los Angeles to catch the kid who stole Jimmy’s milk money, and of course they always got their man. Anyone listening to the programs uncritically would think that the police had unlimited time and resources and boredom thresholds and were willing to use them. I’d imagine their effect was similar to CSI’s, though whether great or negligible I couldn’t say.
The key statistic, I guess, is the rate of unsolved crimes and unconvicted defendants. Has forensics made the former’s rate go down? Has increased knowledge of civil rights made the latter’s rate go down? We need some figures.
Just an anecdote, but some have caused significant headaches. The Nextel Direct Connect (walkie-talkie) feature was a problem for American law enforcement for quite some time. Ironically, CALEA (the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) in the US has actually acted as an impediment to authorized surveillance attempts; in the Nextel case there was an assertion that the Direct Connect was not affected by CALEA because it wasn’t a packet-switched communications platform. VoIP technology has similarly proven a headache.
While these conditions have been mitigated and/or eliminated, it’s not unthinkable that criminal entities could identify “untappable” tools to perform or facilitate their misdeeds. I’d suspect the intelligence community is somewhat less encumbered, though.
Expanding slightly in my earlier statement, recidivism rates are also significant. If someone gets convicted on DNA or other recently-innovative tech (when previously there would not have been enough evidence), surely that person being out of circulation for a few years must have an effect.
Interestingly, tonight’s episode of 60 Minutes talked about bullet-lead analysis, supposedly being able to track the lead content of a bullet back to a specific box. On its face, this sounds like utter hokum to me and it looks like after some 30 years of use, the FBI finally realized it.
According to a report on PRI’s The World (you can download it from this page) things like cameras can actually hinder police work. Seems they waste valuable time looking at/for the recordings rather than getting out and pounding the pavement doing traditional detective work. The reporter who did the story attempted to travel from one part of Britain to another without being caught on tape. He managed to make it all the way to his goal before getting “spotted.” When he requested images of himself from the one security camera he couldn’t avoid (something allowed by British law) he was informed that the camera was pointed at the Thames, and thus no images were available. His comment was that the camera being pointed there was effectively useless, and thus a waste of money.
And leave London vulnerable to pirates? I think not!
This has created a new problem, the CSI effect.
CMC +fnord!
It’s another version of the “Perry Mason Effect”, where jurors are not willing to believe someone’s innocence if their defense attorney is unable to get a confession from the actual murderer. There are jurors who felt that the job of the defense was not to demonstrate innocence, but to prove the guilty party was someone else.