Background

The rapid growth of publicly funded CCTV systems during the 1990s has also simultaneously led to a growth in research aimed at evaluating the impact of CCTV as a crime reduction measure. Much of this research has been ‘post hoc shoestring efforts by the untrained and self interested practitioner ’ (Pawson and Tilley 1994) leading to results which are ‘highly unreliable ’ (Short and Ditton: 1995, 10). However, as Tilley has more recently argued, there is increasingly evidence ‘from various more or less technically adequate evaluations ’ (Tilley 1996, 5) of the crime prevention potential of CCTV. While this research provides a useful starting point, it is limited in focus for understanding the operation of CCTV systems as a mechanism for social control. The evaluation studies of CCTV as a crime prevention and order maintenance strategy have focussed on outcomes (the reduction of crime or fear of crime) rather than of processes (how information is selected, evaluated used and acted upon). This concern with outcomes is also apparent in the Civil Liberties (Liberty 1989, Davis, S. 1996) and sociological approaches (Fyfe and Bannister 1997). These have stressed an Orwellian or Foucaldian vision of the total surveillance society, without regard to the limitations (economic, technological, and political) of the information processing capacities of such systems or the salience of panoptic metaphors in the context of city centre streets. But CCTV is far more than just about the reduction of crime; it is about the power to watch and potentially intervene in a variety of situations, whether they be criminal or not. The question of who and what is watched and what warrants intervention have largely been ignored by existing research. In this context our research aimed to provide an analysis of the social construction of suspicion and its impact on authoritative intervention. It had five broad objectives which we will outline below and explain how each was met