What's crime got to do with it? CCTV, urban security and governing elites

The implementation of an open-street CCTV system is usually accompanied by bold claims on the increase in efficiency – faster deployments of patrols – and in efficacy – prevention through normalisation – that it will bring about in day-to-day policing. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two medium-sized Italian cities where such systems have been recently implemented, the research sets out to challenge these assumptions by offering a backstage view of how surveillance is actually carried out on a day-to-day basis. Using the political and legislative changes that have taken place in Italy since the end of the ‘90s as a backdrop, the work supports the conclusion that, rather than for crime control, for which they were almost never used, cameras end up serving other goals, for the benefit of constituencies other than the residents of the two cities. Thus, CCTV needs to be understood as a device for the circulation of resources - monetary, discursive and normative - between different institutions and levels of government, part of a wider discursive regime that is only incidentally related to how crime actually affects a given city.