Cyclist spots thief with her stolen bike... outside police station — then assaulted during confrontation

Having sat a CCTV course, I can confirm that it is illegal to refuse to allow police who are investigating a case to view and make copies of video footage that may be required for evidence.

Refusal would fall under the crime of 'Obstructing a Police Officer' section 89(2) Police Act 1996' - that could see you in the slammer for a maybe a month or two. (possibly three if youre unlucky)

Data protection means that the footage cant be shown to just anybody or random joe who asks... This unfortunately includes the victim(s) themselves. Some places may give copies of the footage or allow viewing their CCTV if you ask, but they are breaking the law by doing so.

--- Which is doubly unfortunate because we all know that certain police departments/regions quite often dont like/want to investigate things or if they do they do a poor job when it comes to gathering evidence if they consider a case is of low priority. There has been multiple news articles of victims doing their own investigation and evidence gathering over the years when the police have decided it isnt worth their time investigating or done a poor job of it. -- So its a bit of a catch 22. If the police wont investigate/gather evidence and youre not allowed to gather evidence yourself then what hope do you have of getting any sort of justice or retribution?

If people break the law by stealing from you, but then you have to break the law to make sure that these people get caught and justice is served then something is clearly wrong with the system.

RoubaixCube wrote:

Data protection means that the footage cant be shown to just anybody or random joe who asks... This unfortunately includes the victim(s) themselves. Some places may give copies of the footage or allow viewing their CCTV if you ask, but they are breaking the law by doing so.

I'm sorry thats oversimplified bollocks trying to make the CCTV owners life easy and risk free by preventing any Joe Random from getting the footage.

There is nothing in Data Protection law that says you cannot share data.  It says you cannot share it without a valid purpose.  Someone getting robbed is a valid purpose.

A blanket no-sharing policy was never the intent of GDPR although arguably scaring everybody with fines achieved exactly that.

Secret_squirrel wrote:

I'm sorry thats oversimplified bollocks trying to make the CCTV owners life easy and risk free by preventing any Joe Random from getting the footage.

There is nothing in Data Protection law that says you cannot share data.  It says you cannot share it without a valid purpose.  Someone getting robbed is a valid purpose.

A blanket no-sharing policy was never the intent of GDPR although arguably scaring everybody with fines achieved exactly that.

This. The exemption that allows for the police to get the footage is public interest, and an explicit example is "for administration of justice". It has no requirement that the person asking is a police officer.

Of course refusing to provide the officer footage is a crime in its own right (hence why they can't refuse an officer).

The problem is that they can use data protection as an excuse not to do anything.

I suspect the best option would be to request the relevent footage in writing and that if they don't want to provide it under data protection to request it is kept for the relevent authorities (as otherwise they could delete it, often done automatically...). I suspect this would make it hard to delete (as justification for having cameras and processing footage will be prevention of crime... If they won't supply footage then what is the reason per GDPR for having cameras.)

Yep, it all comes down to the fact they know there is unlikely to be much interest in them being caught, even if there was, ineptitude would mean they weren't, and if they were the consequences would still make it worthwhile continueing in their chosen career path.

And if you assert yourself and use some kind of violence against the criminal then there is a greater chance that you will get action taken by the police rather than the thief.

They also know this.