Book Review: Benjamin J. Goold CCTV and Policing: Public Area Surveillance and Police Practices in Britain Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xii + 244 pp. ISBN 978—0—19— 926514—5
| Author | Kevin Walby |
| Date | 01 May 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895809102555 |
| Published date | 01 May 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Criminology & Criminal Justice
© The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and Permissions:
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ISSN 1748–8958; Vol: 9(2): 247–253
DOI: 10.1177/1748895809102555
Benjamin J. Goold
CCTV and Policing: Public Area Surveillance and Police Practices in Britain
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xii + 244 pp. ISBN 978–0–19–
926514–5
• Reviewed by Kevin Walby, Carleton University, Canada
Goold’s book is an empirically detailed account of police and government
agency relations as it concerns implementation and operation of open-
street closed-circuit television (CCTV) camera surveillance in the southern
region of Britain. The book draws from roughly 300 hours of control room
observation and over 100 interviews conducted with camera operators,
police, program administrators and representatives of government between
the years 1997 and 2000. Recently reprinted as part of the Clarendon
Studies in Criminology Series, the real strength of CCTV and Policing is
its assess ment of theoretical claims emanating from the surveillance studies
literature about techno-policing and authoritarianism. Contrary to claims
about increasing levels of camera surveillance being akin to what George
Orwell described in his dystopic novel Nineteen Eight-four, Goold argues
that the police and government agencies in his study suffered from an ‘organ-
izational inflexibility’ (p. 207), making open-street CCTV an ‘adjunct to
more traditional modes of policing’ (p. 213) rather than a technological
force that revolutionizes policing practices.
Goold contends that the rise of open-street CCTV in Britain during the
1990s was rapid and widespread, for a few reasons. First, camera surveil-
lance emerged ‘at a time when politicians and policy-makers were in search
of a new solution to the problem of crime and … a way of convincing the
public that they were serious about crime prevention’ (p. 20). Second, com-
pared to...
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