Next time you’re strolling through Glasgow and spot a CCTV camera, why not give a cheery wave in case there’s someone on the other end watching you. There probably isn’t though. The cameras that cover the city, all 439 of them, are now un-manned for half the day. A quarter of them also don’t work at all. CCTV in Glasgow is dying, and we need to ask what that could mean for the people who live here.

I first heard about the situation from a friend of a friend of mine, who’s a copper in Glasgow. He asked me if I knew what was about to happen to the city’s CCTV. To save money, he said, the council was planning to make cuts to the monitoring centre, slashing it from 24-hours-a-day to 12-hours-a-day. He told me he was worried about the effect it could have on the ability to respond to live incidents, so I wrote about it, and lots of people expressed their concern about it, and in due course it happened anyway: CCTV monitoring for half the day only.

Another thing that was happening at the same time, for similar reasons, was that the condition of the cameras themselves was deteriorating. Glasgow’s CCTV takes a lot of battering from the weather and is prone to problems like condensation and pixillation, and it requires proper and regular maintenance. However the council has made cuts to the maintenance budgets and around 114 cameras aren’t working; it’s also 12 years since the system was upgraded. The GMB union, which represents some of the workers who look after the cameras, says the CCTV is being slowly driven into the ground.

Some of us will sympathise with the council and understand that, as with every other local authority, budgets are under pressure and they need to make cuts. But we also need to consider the effect that a decrepit and under-manned CCTV system might be having in........

© Herald Scotland