News paper reports aren't peer reviewed scientific research.
How many journalists do you think even have a rigorous enough understanding of statistics to even begin to be able to answer these sort of questions ?
Do you think before this data came out that the Telegraph or Daily Mail were pro-CCTV ? - or do you think that they'd already decided their position long before and were just looking for whatever data would back them up ?
The wikipedia page sites sources. The Daily Mail article I described as a "sensationalist article". The first Telegraph article cites its source of data. The second Telegraph is a commentary piece with 106 comments from people giving a sampling of opinion with "comment" in the URL. And the final report is from the California State Library and shows its working.
Better more rigourous sources would be nicer but we at least already have some that aren't particularly promising which seems counter intuitive. CCTV also comes at a huge cost, paid for by tax payers and hence determined by voters.
The problem with non-peer reviewed articles is that you don't know how they selected the data, etc. Scientific research requires you set your hypothesis before you get the results.
Clearly this didn't happen in this case. Why did Telegraph chose to use this particular metric ("crimes solved using CCTV") rather than for instance "crime rate change as a result of CCTV" (which would take into account deterrence). Why did they choose to use total number of CCTV cameras rather than the number of active CCTV cameras ?
One of the points of peer review is spot biases like this.
I'm not saying that CCTV works (or that it doesn't) but newspapers or non-peer reviewed research often falls far below an acceptable standard for evidence.
How many journalists do you think even have a rigorous enough understanding of statistics to even begin to be able to answer these sort of questions ?
Do you think before this data came out that the Telegraph or Daily Mail were pro-CCTV ? - or do you think that they'd already decided their position long before and were just looking for whatever data would back them up ?