I was confronted by someone the other day when I was working on a site where we have cameras mounted on a lampost as he was convinced that the cameras where part of some government scheme to reduce the number of police on the streets by using cameras to monitor people being naughty,<p>

Well, this is actually happening in other countries, too. Here in Germany, some of the most surveillance-happy politicians have been cutting the budgets of the police forces in their federal lands.

My opinion is that a well-trained, well-staffed, well-paid and well-equipped (in that order) police force is what catches criminals. If you're reducing the first two and equip them with stuff that's not actually useful (most cameras aren't, even less so if there's not enough manpower to actually evaluate the recordings), you're not going to get better results.