Cameras Everywhere Doesn't Mean Safety

You’ll see cameras on poles, mounted on buildings, attached to buses, tucked into shops and stairwells and elevators. Some you’ll notice right away. Most you won’t even see. We’re absolutely surrounded by them now. And the reason is always the same: more cameras equals more security, which equals less crime. But when you actually dig into the evidence, the story gets way messier.

Surveillance Is Not a Solution

Cameras create a feeling of protection. That matters a lot, especially politically and psychologically. When something bad happens, officials can point to all this infrastructure and say “look, we did something.”

But feeling safe and actually being safe aren’t the same thing at all.

Most cameras don’t prevent crime, they just record it. Usually after everything already went down. Studies from all over the world show that covering entire areas with CCTV barely touches violent crime rates. It works a bit better for specific stuff like car theft in parking lots, where someone’s looking for an easy target and might get spooked by a visible camera.

But for most real harm? Cameras just sit there watching it happen. So we have to understand, cameras do not lower crime. They just make identification and prosecution easier after the act. They are not a deterrent for most criminals, and they do not stop bad things from happening. If someone is determined to do something harmful, they might care a little about the cameras, but even then, they would just find a way around them.

A Game of Cat and Mouse

When you put cameras everywhere in one neighborhood, crime doesn’t magically stop. It just relocates to the next street over, a different bus stop, another part of town where the cameras haven’t reached yet. The problem doesn’t get solved, it gets moved.

Cameras don’t fix why crime happens in the first place. They don’t address poverty, addiction, people feeling isolated and disconnected, or communities that don’t trust the cops or government. None of that gets solved by a camera on a pole. You’re just pushing the symptoms around while the actual disease keeps spreading.

This creates a weird illusion of progress while the underlying issues stay exactly the same.

Nobody’s Actually Watching

Here’s something most people don’t realize: in most places, nobody’s monitoring these feeds in real time. The cameras are recording and storing footage, sure. Maybe someone reviews it later if something happened. Maybe they don’t bother.

Even with AI trying to help, these systems struggle with understanding context. They can detect movement but not intent. They flag patterns but can’t actually understand threats. You end up with tons of false alarms, missed incidents, and way too much faith in technology that’s nowhere near as smart as people assume it is.

China Took This to the Extreme

Want to see what happens when you go all-in on surveillance? Look at China.

They’ve built the most extensive camera network on the planet with over 700 million cameras and counting. Facial recognition everywhere. Social credit scores that track your behavior. Systems that monitor where you go, who you’re with, what you buy, what you say online.

The official line is always that it’s for public safety and catching criminals. But it’s also being used to monitor protests, track ethnic minorities (especially Uighurs in Xinjiang), identify people at political gatherings, and generally keep tabs on anyone the government thinks might be a problem. Step out of line and your social credit score drops. Suddenly you can’t buy plane tickets, get loans, or get your kid into a decent school.

This is what “safety through surveillance” looks like when there’s no oversight, no limits, no one who can push back. The infrastructure gets built for one stated reason, then slowly expands to cover absolutely everything.

China didn’t invent surveillance creep, they just showed how far you can take it when nobody’s in a position to say no.

Who Gets Watched the Most

Surveillance doesn’t hit everyone equally, not even close.

Poor neighborhoods get more cameras installed. Minority communities get monitored harder. People who are already dealing with discrimination get stopped more often, questioned more aggressively, tracked more closely. The same camera system that claims to be completely neutral somehow always seems to focus on certain groups of people.

And once you build this kind of infrastructure, it never stays limited to its original purpose. What starts as “preventing crime” slowly turns into crowd monitoring, tracking protests, building huge databases of where people go and who they hang out with. The mission creep happens every single time.

History’s been pretty clear about this. Tools that get built for safety have this annoying habit of becoming tools for control instead. And this, is the concern i have. If history told us otherwise, I would be more optimistic about the future of surveillance. But it didn’t. It told us that every time we build a system like this, it eventually gets used in ways we never intended and can’t control.

A couple of years ago, we had a security company all over the news in Denmark. The company was offering alarm systems to homeowners, and the idea was simple. If an alarm is triggered, someone from their central monitoring station would call the authorities and let them know. It was a service that promised to make homes safer by providing a quick response to break-ins or emergencies. The company was doing well, and is to my surprise still doing so. Alright, back to the news. The employees behing this company were watching their customers naked, while some employees even stated that it was normal to see people record and send this footage to other colleagues. The company was not only violating the privacy of their customers, but also putting them at risk of being exposed to the public. This is a clear example of how surveillance can be abused and how it can lead to unintended consequences.

So, What Actually Makes Places Safer?

Here’s the boring truth that nobody in power really wants to hear.

Real safety comes from better street lighting so people can actually see what’s around them. Communities where people know each other and look out for one another. Social services that actually work and help people before they’re desperate. Mental health support you can actually reach out to, and without going broke. Cities designed so that public spaces feel welcoming and people actually want to hang out there. Education and culture that promotes trust between citizens and institutions, so people feel like they have a stake in their community and a reason to follow the rules. THESE are the things that make places safer.

But we still keep installing cameras even when the data shows pretty clearly that they don’t deliver on what they promise.

But Why do We Keep Buying the Camera Story?

Cameras are just easier to sell, plain and simple. They’re relatively cheap compared to actually fixing deep social problems that have been building for decades. They’re simple to justify after something terrible happens and everyone’s scared. You can literally point at them on a map and say “look what we’re doing.”

They also do something politically useful that nobody talks about openly: they shift blame. If crime happens anyway despite all the cameras, well, the system did its job. The footage exists somewhere. The failure becomes about individual bad actors, not about broken systems or problems that got ignored for years.

That’s incredibly convenient if you’re running a city and don’t want to answer harder questions about inequality or why certain neighborhoods have been abandoned.

A Better Question

Instead of constantly asking “how much can we watch people,” maybe we should be asking “why do we feel like we need to watch everyone all the time in the first place?”

A city that needs constant surveillance to feel secure is usually a city that’s avoiding some much harder conversations about what’s actually broken underneath. It’s treating symptoms instead of looking at the disease.

Cameras can really help in specific situations. I’m not saying they’re completely useless. But when they become the go-to answer for every safety concern, when they’re the first thing we reach for instead of the last option, they stop being about safety at all. They start being about control and looking like you’re doing something.

And control isn’t the same thing as security. Sometimes it’s the exact opposite.