In a report to the Scottish Office on the impact of CCTV, Jason Ditton, Director of the Scottish Centre for Criminology, argued that the claims of crime reduction are little more than fantasy. In short, the crime statistics are without credibility. The crime statistics rarely, if ever, reflect the hypothesis that CCTV merely displaces criminal activity to areas outside the range of the cameras. One of the features of current surveillance practice is that the cameras are often installed in high-rent commercial areas. Crime may be merely pushed from high value commercial areas into low rent residential areas.
Councils often find that it is impossible to resist demands for such systems.
There is an additional element of displacement that should be of particularly concern to all communities. Since the growth of CCTV as the primary means of crime prevention, more traditional, community based measures have been discarded. A Scottish Centre for Criminology report on CCTV in Airdre was unable to rule out displacement as a factor. 5 while various studies in other countries indicate that burglars and other criminals will travel long distances to commit crimes. The Crime Prevention Unit of the Home Office appears to agree.