Berkeley Releases Study on San Francisco Cameras

I am really proud of my colleagues here at UC Berkeley for performing a first of its kind (in the US) study of the efficacy of police surveillance cameras. Its findings are limited to San Francisco’s system, but it is valuable in thinking through whether and how surveillance cameras should be implemented. I have to be careful about characterizing it, but here is an article in the Chronicle on its findings, and the full report is here (8.9 MB PDF). The authors explain: “…The findings include a determination that while the program decreased property crime within the view of the cameras by twenty percent, other forms of crime, including violent crime, one of the primary targets of the program, were not affected.”