Video Monitoring – a New Instrument of Crime Prevention

“Video Monitoring – a New Instrument of Crime Prevention” is the first research project on this topic in Poland financed by a doctoral research grant of  the Ministry of Science and Higher Education ((Nr 1457/H03/2006/31).

It was started in October 2006, its completion is foreseen for March 2008. The research forms part of the doctoral project of Pawel Waszkewicz carried out in the Chair of Criminalistics of University of Warsaw under scholarly supervision of Prof. Ewa Gruza. The project aims at examination of the actual influence of video monitoring on the rate of criminality. The preventive effect of the said shall be compared to the other, traditional and new, means of crime prevention. The research shall be based on the analysis of police statistics of the experimental zones covered by such monitoring and comparable control areas (not covered by such monitoring) within the time immediately previous to the introduction of monitoring  and the one year period after its introduction. The second research tool shall be an anonymous victimizing questionnaire carried out among the inhabitants of both areas. The first research results shall be presented at scientific conferences in Dubrovnik, Tübingen, Vilnius and Bologna.