<論文>防犯カメラの設置過程に関する社会学的考察 : 商店街における調査事例から

Abstract

Recently in Japan, installing CCTVs (closed circuit televisions) in public places such as stores, stations, parking-lots, parks, schools, streets etc., has been spreading nationwide. While in the past CCTVs were under the supervision of the administrative sectors and the police, now it is mainly being operated by civil organizations and local people. These phenomena have promoted a great deal of researches on the subject. However, the studies so far have been limited to subjects such as abstract theoretical questions and liberal critiques of using CCTVs, as well as statistical analyses attempting to figure out whether the CCTVs were effective enough in fighting crime, but these studies fail to address the practical aspects of their current spread. Drawing attention to these practical aspects, this study aims at finding out, through interviews, the reasons for why shopping street unions make use of CCTVs. I chose shopping street unions as the subject of my survey because unlike in the case of the other public places mentioned above, they are installed by local people, and this offers a good opportunity to investigate the reasons and the processes involved. While the mass media stresses that the main reason for installing CCTVs lies in the need to fight crime, various other practical reasons have been found in my survey. For instance, there is a union that set up CCTVs in order to investigate the passers-by for a purely commercial purpose. In another case, CCTVs were used just to take advantage of the budget distributed by the administrative sectors and local groups that are formed by local enterprises, with no concrete purpose. By focusing on the question of how the gap between the discourses found in the interviews and in the mass media was constructed, I discovered that the reasoning for making use of CCTVs changed after their installations: the unions started to put a growing emphasis on the possible effects of the CCTVs against crimes, and this change was actually due to a "paradoxical" reasoning in order to justify their installations. I argue that the change in the discourse might contribute to an additional increase of the CCTVs in the future. In sum, I managed to reveal in my survey that there were different reasons for installing CCTVs in the shopping street unions, apart from fighting crime, and this led me to question why and how these reasons were concealed, as well as what kind of meaning this concealment might represent.