HISTORY

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.