Technology in crime prevention

There has been a massive amount of improvement in crime prevention used by the police in the last few years, due to new technology, preventing crime has became a lot more easier. The use of CCTV is essential to any large business or building, many homes now have CCTV cameras as it gives them the reassurance that they will be able to act if their house is ever broken into. Before the new CCTV, the analogue system was most popular, although very flawed, and a lot of CCTV systems were never switched on or even function correctly. It was a common problem that police wouldn't be able to have any recording of a crime due to simply people forgetting to turn them on. The use of CCTV is now essential in towns and city across the UK, in most town or cities you will find many CCTV cameras, it generally makes the job of policing a lot easier and secures the safety of citizens as it makes criminals a lot less likely to attack on people when they're being watched. This system is useful for picking up when there is an problem such as drunken behaviour  and fights which means that there is a even greater amount of protection for the general public and means that police can be informed quickly when events like these happen.

Over the years filing technology has become more sophisticated, before all files were physical and could become very hard to find the right one when it was needed. The new systems works through a massive databases where peoples names are held when they have been arrested, this ensures that names are never lost and can be easily retrieved, so that if they were to commit another crime it would be as easy to type their name into a database to see their record, this means that the police can act accordingly to the crime that they have committed, often if they are a repeated offender their punishment will be more severe, but if they aren't on the database and it's their first time, they are often let off with a warning depending on the crime committed.

There are some problems with new technology, one problem is that the comfort of the citizens isn't often maintained now that CCTV technology has become popular, there's no need to have as many police patrolling the streets at night, and therefore people feel less safe as they would like direct action to be taken when a crime is committed. 

New kinds of criminals have appeared more and more with new technology, firstly with the popularity of some sites such as thepiratebay.org and kat.ph, pirating films, music and video games has become very easy, a simple click of a button and you are able to download pretty much anything, this has caused a huge amount of piracy and has become a real problem for song writers and film studios. And computer hacking has also arisen with the advances in technology, the most extreme cases are the hackings of government databases, and leaked information being uploaded to websites such as wikileaks.com. many celebrities have had personal information leaked as hackers have been able to access their emails.

 This article is an example of a crime that was committed due to advancements in technology, the thieves were able to find and track down incredibly rich people who they would then rob. It would have not been possible for them to have done this around 15 years ago because the internet was still in it's early stages. 
Other forms of crime due to technology would include Cyber crime, crime that takes place primarily on the internet, the most common of which would be the stealing of personal information, this is done by using mail or spam to distribute viruses,worms, spyware and Trojan horse software. Spam directed at computer programs/files, instant messaging systems,weblogs and mobile phones makes these tools vulnerable to worms, viruses, and fraud. Some viruses facilitate the illicit access of the personal or sensitive data stored on the devices. For mobile phones, new text messaging technology enables senders to conceal their identity, allowing impersonated messages that can facilitate spam, fraud and viruses. Malware enables criminals to use the mobile phone without the user’s knowledge or gain access to the phone’s personal data. The exploitation of these technologies is expected to increase in the next year. Spam also poses a threat to wireless game consoles, personal data assistants (PDA) andVoice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). That is why it is essential to use an antivirus on any computer that is connected to the internet, as virus attacks have become very common.

These are some of the types of malware that can be installed onto a computer