Attitudes trends from 2000-2011 towards public CCTV systems in the UK
Abstract
The UK has led the way in introducing CCTV within urban settings. This study analysed CCTV attitude trends over a period of rapid expansion where the number of cameras rose from 21,000 (1999) to 30,000 (2011). Using an undergraduate sample (n=753), this study surveyed attitudes towards CCTV systems over this period using identical measures in each year. Remarkably, no significant change was found across two underlying attitudes towards CCTV. Both males and females reported similar and consistent views regarding the potential benefits of CCTV. The study concludes that the normalising advance of surveillance technology continues with little evidence of reaction.
Key Words: CCTV, Attitudes, Public Surveillance, Gender, Urban
Attitudes trends from 2000-2011 towards public CCTV systems in the UK
There has been a growing use of public CCTV systems within the UK since the initial introduction of a large-scale street based system in Bournemouth in 1985 (Bannister, Fyfe & Kearns, 1998). Norris, McCahill and Wood (2004) estimate that there were no more than 10 cities with public CCTV systems in 1991. After a series of UK government funded initiatives that began from the mid 1990s, the number of such systems increased dramatically, to at least 684 in 1998, and again 800 by 1999 (Gill & Spriggs 2005). In 1999, Webster (1999) reports the existence of 21,000 local authority controlled CCTV cameras. By 2005, the author of this paper contacted 20 local authorities (a mix of urban and more rural authorities) and when the number of cameras for the population size of this sample was extrapolated for the UK as a whole an estimate of 27,445 authority controlled public space cameras was obtained. More recently still, Gerrard and Thompson (2011) estimate the figure for this type of camera to be somewhat higher at 30,631. Clearly, the prevalence of CCTV has grown enormously since its humble beginnings, and this growth has continued since the turn of the Millennium to date.
Today public CCTV systems are a ubiquitous feature of the modern urban landscape in the United Kingdom (Gill, Bryan & Allen, 2007; Webster 2009), whereas just 25 years ago they barely existed at all. However, it is not just the number of cameras that has grown, their diffusion into ever more remote locations has followed (Webster, 2009). In some cases public CCTV now innervates conurbations the size of a village with a population of 100 (Daily Record, July 7th 2008). The exact number of public space CCTV systems may be a matter of debate (Gerrard & Thompson, 2011) but whether there has been a CCTV revolution over the last 25 years is not in doubt.
Since the introduction of CCTV researchers have investigated its efficiency in reducing crime and fear of crime (for reviews see: Welsh & Farrington, 2002; Gill & Spriggs, 2005). Some of this research has focussed upon CCTV operator practice and factors affecting active target selection and suspicion (XXXX, 2011; XXXX, 2007; Norris & MacCahill, 2006; Gill & Spriggs, 2005, Loveday & Gill 2004; Smith, 2004; Troscianko, Holmes, Stillman, Mirmehdi, Wright, & Wilson, 2004; Norris & Armstrong, 1997). However, during the early growth period of CCTV from the middle 1990s onwards a good deal of research effort was devoted to the public’s attitude towards it (Ditton, 1998; Honess & Charman, 1992). Clearly some estimation of public attitudes to what was a new, and for some a fearful development in crime control was needed in order to develop practice and codes of conduct, but also in many cases to pave the way for small scale piece meal systems championed by moral entrepreneurs in different locations (Ditton & Short, 1998). Establishing what was and was not acceptable to the public, in terms of the use and perceived benefits of CCTV is particularly important at a time of introduction and expansion (Tilley, 1998; Honess & Charman, 1992). In this earlier period public support for CCTV systems was often reported to be at remarkably high levels (Ditton, 2000; Geake, 1993). Jason Ditton (1998) found that some of this early enthusiasm may be attributed to poor survey techniques, and in particular the placing of critical questions in the context of other positively skewed or leading statements. Yet even where these biases are removed when professional researchers measure CCTV support, values around 60-70% in favour were not unusual (Ditton, 1998, p221). So the position before the Millennium in the UK appears to have been one of strong support for CCTV, possibly based upon the widely held belief that CCTV ‘works’ in combating crime (Webster 2009). However, the reviews above give little reason to suppose that CCTV is as effective as early pioneers had hoped (e.g., Gill & Spriggs, 2005). Could this have affected support for CCTV over the longer term if people’s perceptions of local crime levels have remained unaltered since their introduction (Gill, et al., 2007)? Such impressions may call into question the basic efficacy of CCTV systems and have given rise to a more cynical attitude towards them today, what may be termed a ‘public surveillance hangover’. As Webster (2009) puts it:
“…citizens want CCTV, but that they assume it is a technology that delivers certain outcomes. Presumably, as time passes and greater awareness of the limitations and implications of CCTV use become common knowledge public support will diminish” (p18).
Of course there are also reasons to suppose that changes in people’s attitudes towards CCTV may have become more positive over time. There is the effect of mere exposure. That which is seen often, even in subtle forms becomes familiar, and is then seen as more positive than the unfamiliar (Bornstein, 1989). Similarly, new applications of CCTV once installed may bring people round to see its benefits beyond mere crime control (Germain, Douillet & Dumoulin, 2011). This may follow from the process of CCTV diffusion, i.e., the increasingly prevalent nature of this crime deterrence measure into ever more settings, and appropriation, where more come to encounter or make use of such systems in practical way. Indeed, for some the cameras may simply be serving their purpose by reassuring people who perceive a personal threat of some sort when out and about. This would give rise to an increase in the recollection of positive experiences associated with the cameras (XXXX, 2009). Also, visible crime deterrence measures may provide a reassuring symbol of collective control over crime that alleviates more general and displaced anxieties about social change and growing insecurity in late-modern societies (Farrall, Gray & Jackson, 2007). Here the act of ‘doing something’ -anything, whether it deals with crime or not may offer some defence against the fear of wider social changes.
Changing social attitudes towards crime and fear of crime that are not directly related to local experience with CCTV may also influence judgments. For example, the increasing concern in Western societies regarding the ‘problem’ of law and order may have led to a greater acceptance of stronger situational crime deterrence measures generally (e.g., Farrall, Jackson & Gray, 2009; Bauman, 2006; Garland, 2001). Events such as September the 11th may have presaged a greater tolerance of surveillance and less concern for the disadvantages over the last ten years (e.g., Davis & Silver, 2004). While critical incidents such as the murder of James Bulger in 1993 (Norris & McCahill, 2006) or the city riots in the UK in August 2011 may also contribute towards the ebb and flow of CCTV approval.
The Present Study
What is missing in CCTV attitude research is some consistent measure of how support and opinions towards CCTV may have changed over the longer-term during which public CCTV systems have generally expanded in one European nation that was in the forefront ‘normalising’ this feature of urban settings. This paper is designed to address this question of effects over time by analysing the trends in cross sectional survey data administered annually using the same set of questions regarding CCTV over the years 2001 to 2010. Within a cross-sectional design, 753 university students were asked a set of 16 Likert scale based questions concerning over a ten year period during which CCTV gradually innervated the urban landscape. The important feature of this study is that the same questions were presented in the same format to the same type of cohort in each of the years and so it is hoped that clear comparisons may be made over time, albeit across undergraduate samples, while extraneous variables associated with the attitude measure itself are kept to a minimum.
Method
Participants
A total of 753 2nd year undergraduate students enrolled on a psychology methodology module agreed to take part. Participation was voluntary, although the non-response rate was below 10% in all years. Their ages ranged between 18 and 50 years. A full breakdown of the counts in each age and gender category is presented in table 1 below.
Table 1 about here
Design
This study employs an cross-sectional trend survey method in order to describe attitudes towards CCTV over a period of ten years in the UK.
Materials: The survey items
The survey instrument included 16 items developed by the author following interviews with members of the public in an urban town centre North of London in 2000 that was conducted as part of another CCTV research project. Key phrases related to CCTV systems were adapted so that they could be fitted to a Likert format using the scale anchors “Strongly Agree”, “Agree”, “Neutral”, “Disagree”, “Strongly Disagree”, (after a method suggested by Moser & Kalton, 1989: please see appendix A for a full copy of the complete survey sheet with all original questions). The 16 survey items were balanced for evaluative direction and selected so as to tap the cognitive, behavioural and affective components of the attitude construct of CCTV (Eagly & Chaiken, 1998). In order to obtain an internally reliable composite scale/s for the trend analysis that follows the 16 items were subjected to PCA in order to explore their factor structure (Pallant, 2010). A Scree plot indicated the clear presence of two equally distinct factors. The variance explained from the cumulative sum of squared loadings for these was 29.91% (16.65 and 13.26% for each component; The KMO value was 0.73 and Bartlett’s test of sphericity was below 0.001). The item to factor loadings above 0.45 are shown in table 2 below, all other items were not included in the subsequent scales and analysis.
Table 2 about here
The first factor scale was labelled ‘security benefits’ and had a standardized alpha value of 0.70 (M=2.94, SD=0.56). The second factor was labelled ‘surveillance apprehension’ and had an alpha value of 0.62 (M=3.74, SD=0.62). Although the alpha value on the second factor was a little low, this is not an uncommon problem with very short scales. In these cases Briggs and Cheek (1986) suggest an inter-item correlation between .2-.4 is acceptable and for this scale the value was 0.28.
Procedure
Participants were invited to complete the survey within a methodology lab concerning attitude scale development. In each year between 2001 and 2010 members of the lab were given a hard copy sheet (appendix A) at the beginning of the second session and asked to complete this without discussing their answers with others. An assistant then collected completed sheets; the class was thanked.
Results
Mean total scores for the two scales were computed for each person in each year (a score of one was given for strong agreement, hence low scores mean greater endorsement of each construct). Basic descriptive statistics are presented in table 3 and fig 1 below. A one way between groups MANOVA was performed to test whether any differences existed in attitudes over the ten years. Preliminary assumption testing found no serious violations for this method. No significant difference was found between these year groups when both attitude scales were treated as two dependent measures [F(16,1424)=0.91, p=0.556, Wilk’s Lamba=0.98 η2 =0.01]. Further univariate tests failed to find any effect of year groups on each scale, and a simple correlation analysis failed to find any significant association between year and each measure (Security Benefits, r=0.05, n=735, p=0.19; Surveillance Apprehension, r=0.02, n=732, p=0.63).
Table 3 about here. Figure 1 about here
An analysis of participant age category did reveal a modest significant Spearman Rho correlation existed between the ‘CCTV security benefits’ and age category (rs=0.08, 724, p=0.02). This was such that as people fell into older groups they appear to report a more positive attitude towards the benefits of CCTV. However, as illustrated in table 1 above, age group may be confounded by gender so this may also indicate a difference between males and females on this scale. Therefore a further test of any correlation between security benefits was conducted for males and females separately. This confirmed that only females showed a significant relationship between age and increased appreciation of CCTV security benefits (rs=0.12, 534, p=0.008).
In order to explore other differences in CCTV attitudes across gender a further MANOVA was undertaken. Again, preliminary assumption testing was undertaken and no violations noted. This test revealed that when all years were collapsed, there was a significant difference in mean attitude scores across gender using the two scales as dependent measures [F(4,1310)=4.19, p=0.002, Wilk’s Lambda=0.97, η2 =0.013]. An examination of the univariate results indicates that this difference was uniquely located with the ‘CCTV Surveillance Apprehension’ scale [F(2,658)=6.24, p=0.002, η2 =0.02]. Females score significantly higher (M=3.78, SD=0.59) than males (M=3.61, SD=0.71) indicating they have less concern with being watched by cameras than male participants. The relevant descriptive statistics are shown in table 4 below.