From the Evening Standard:

London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million, figures show today.

But an analysis of the publicly funded spy network, which is owned and controlled by local authorities and Transport for London, has cast doubt on its ability to help solve crime.

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.

Of course, the real purpose of the cameras is not to fight crime; but given that such is their stated purpose, it’s obvious that the politicians who sold people on them were wrong (or, more likely, lying). If they don’t remove the “useless” cameras now, which they won’t, it ought to prove that the purpose of the cameras all along was to keep tabs on the citizenry.

(Meanwhile, they’re putting in cameras in other cities, including Pittsburgh, where I live, ostensibly to protect us from crime and terrorism.)