The human beings have used surveillance for centuries, and will also continue
with it. Surveillance has been used in many di erent ways in di erent
countries over the years. But it has almost always been used to guard objects
of value or to prevent certain things from happening. Surveillance is a part
of crime control, and as long as there have exist crimes, it also have exist
crime control. To deal with the crimes in a controlled way, people started
to create groups that worked with prevention of crimes. They ended up to
be known as the police. The police could be very e ective in a town for
example. As soon as a thief was caught, every police could go and look at
him. This was very important because if they knew how he looked like, they
could pay extra attention to him when he was out of jail. But soon it became
hard for the police to remember all the criminals, and it became easier for
them to commit new crimes. To prevent this and to be able to give longer
sentence to criminals that had committed crimes before, the police started
to make a register of all the criminals. The register contained information
about name, sex, age, height, hair color, color of the eyes, etc. The problem
was that if the police didn't recognize the person they couldn't know if the
criminal actually told them the truth about the name for example. To avoid
this, the police needed to make a simple drawing of the criminal and store
that together with the other information in the register.
The drawings were of course of much help in many cases but depending of
how good the man who made the drawings was the identi cation of criminals
was hard. But then came the invention that should change it all, not only
for the police but for many people and also underlies what today is called
CCTV; it was the camera. So the method of using photography as crime
prevention is almost as old as the camera itself. One of the rst countries
to use photographic surveillance was England that already in 1913 started
to use cameras to supervise. It was the secret service, Scotland Yard, that
installed new cameras in Holloway Prison in 1913, to spyön inmates from far
distance and without their knowledge. Actually the police in England started
to use cameras to photograph the inmates already in 1854, but back then
the inmates went to a speci c room and were photographed with a camera...
What Scotland Yard did in 1913 was a totally di erent thing because the
inmates didn't know about the installed cameras and therefore behaved in a
di erent way. Soon the record with all photographs became enormously large
and unmanageable. In just 10 years the register could grow from 0 to 100,000
photographs. Therefore a man called Bertillion started to make a standardized
system for criminal identi cation. In the end the information about a
criminal in the system contained two photographs, one full scale photo and
one in the pro le, and a couple of measurements of the body. Bertillion's
system was spread out in the world in a fast way and by 1893 it was being
used in 'The United States, Belgium, Switzerland, Russia, much of South
America, Tunisia, the British West Indies and Rumania' (Sekula 1992: 384
fn 54)". However this system wasn't used for such a long time, since the use
of ngerprints became a more convenient way to identify persons.
At this time the camera served as a very simple surveillance system.
But it had many disadvantages. One of them was that the system wasn't
automatic. A person had to stand behind the camera and take photos, and
then he also had to develop the photos before they could be used to show
other persons what he had seen. Another problem was that the person behind
the camera had to be alert and decide when to take a picture.
The next very important invention that should revolutionize camera surveillance
was the television. The TV became very popular in the 1930s, and
it soon started to be used in camera surveillance systems. Now one could
directly watch what the camera captured without developing photos. It also
meant that more than one person could see the same thing at the same time.
However there still existed problems. The images could be viewed directly
on a monitor or television, but if anyone wanted to store them to be able to
replay a certain scenario it took a lot of time, and cost a lot of money because
the lm had to be processed in a similar way as the photos were developed before. It had to wait until the 1960s, and the invention of videotapes and
the VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) before the surveillance systems started
to become really powerful and similar to the CCTV systems that are seen
today. With the VCR the lm could be recorded directly and also replayed
instantly, in a fast and cheap way.
The bene ts with these systems were many compared to the old ones.
And maybe the most important one was that the systems actually didn't have
to have 24 hours supervision by personal each day. The only service that had
to been done was to change videocassettes in the VCR. So the systems were
at this point almost automatic, which was a huge di erence compared to
the old ones. Then in 1967, Photoscan launched the rst commercial CCTV
system. The idea was that it should be used in stores to prevent shoplifting.
Soon people started so see the possibilities to use CCTV in many di erent
situations. In 1974 CCTV systems were installed at di erent locations in
London to supervise the tra-c at important roads. Also airports, subways
and football arenas started to use CCTV system for security reasons.
Due to the many possibilities with CCTV systems in many di erent
situations and locations the market for camera surveillance exploded. The
costumers on the market wanted more, and the distributors of CCTV systems
developed new products very rapidly. It is especially during the 90s and the
beginning of the new century that the area of CCTV has experiences an
almost incredible expansion. The probably most important new idea within
the area of CCTV since the VCR is the use of digital technology instead
of analogue. The camera surveillance systems has always used analogue so-
lutions. When the digital technology came, it revolutionized the world, but
for some reason most of the CCTV distributors kept on using analogue technology.
Today the CCTV systems di er a lot. There exist roughly three
di erent classes of CCTV systems on the market. First there is the plain
analogue systems, where the cameras are analogue, as well as the VCR:s
and the monitors. Then there are the hybrid systems that are a combination
of analogue and digital technology. It can for example be analogue cameras
with digital VCR:s", so called DVR:s (Digital Video Recorder). And nally
there are the systems where basically everything is digital.
