2.1 Introduction

Over the past decade, we have witnessed a widespread deployment of surveillance equipment throughout most major cities in Europe and North America. Perhaps most remarkable are the ways in which closed circuit television (CCTV) has become a pervasive resource for monitoring and managing behaviour in public places in urban environments. The deployment of CCTV and surveillance equipment has been accompanied by the development of a particular form of workplace, the surveillance or operations centre. For example, if you take central London, a range of organisations including the police, London Underground, Westminster Council, British Transport Police, Oxford Street Trade Association, Railtrack and the like have developed operation centres that enable the surveillance of public areas and provide resources for the management of problems and events. These centres of coordination are primarily responsible for deploying organisation, that is, providing staff, widely dispersed within the remote domain, with the resources to enable and in some cases engender the systematic coordination of activities. In other words, personnel in the operation centres transform information that is made available to a centralised domain and use that information to provide others, in particular mobile staff, with ways of seeing events and responding to problems that would otherwise remain unavailable.

Aside from the political and moral implications of the widespread deployment of CCTV equipment, it also generates severe practical problems for the operators of the surveillance equipment. It is recognised that the human operator based in an operations centre...