CCTV Technology

Since the mid to early 1990's around the UK there has been an explosion in the number of CCTV systems in operation both privately and within the public sector.

Closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras are now a common sight on public highways and in shopping malls and arcades. As the number of systems has increased so has their technological sophistication.

The Government and Home Office have promoted CCTV Schemes as part of the fight against crime and with various public funding for community CCTV Schemes, most towns
and communities now have there own CCTV Schemes monitored from town centre control rooms which often have direct contact with police officers on the ground.


CCTV Systems are used in a number of different roles within certain different communities these vary from overt use of CCTV within shopping complex and car parks, to the use of CCTV to monitor traffic and the public within a safety frame work.

CCTV is also used by the police service to monitor road traffic one of the largest of these cctv schemes is the one use by the Metropolitan Police in London which monitors the M25 and all routes in and out of London including the main roads in central london, these live pictures are delivered to central traffic control at new scotland yard where officers can watch road traffic images live and direct officers on the ground to incidents by using the images provided by the cameras.

Other uses of CCTV by the police include various town and city centre schemes which are monitored from local police control rooms, these schemes are often used to great success in targeting thieves and criminals as well as to monitor public order at weekends and evenings.

The police service also use CCTV for a variety of covert uses such as surveillance of target premises and locations where police have intelligence that crime is likely to occur, these types of cctv covert operations are used to remotely monitor premises without having to have police officers engaged in long term operational surveillance.