MEMBERS of Penryn town council have asked for positive evidence of the effectiveness of CCTV cameras in the town.

At a meeting of Penryn town council this week, former mayor Mary May said although she didn't doubt the cameras' effectiveness, people needed tangible proof that they were doing a good job.

"When they went up everybody thought they were great," she said. "There was such a big build-up in the first few months but a lot of people, because they haven't seen anything in the papers, are wondering whether the cameras are really on."

However community beat officer Andrew Filkin told the council that the cameras were on and monitored '24/7' by the control room in Truro. He added that crime figures (see page 24) showed the cameras had had a positive effect in reducing crime.

"Since CCTV has been installed only eight to ten per cent of the crime in the whole town comes from the main street," he said. "Before CCTV it was massively higher."

He was backed by Aidan Ackerman, who manages a team of CCTV operators studying the streets of Penryn from the offices of Carrick district council in Truro. He said there had been many successes and statistics out next week could confirm that.

"We were finding that the issues in Penryn tended to be lower level nuisance," he said "but we were of the opinion that what we were doing was very successful in reducing the crime or - even more - some of the concerns about crime."

However Mr Ackerman said many people were often unaware of positive successes of CCTV.

"The difficulty is we do good work but members of the public might not appreciate it. One evening, working on the CCTV in Penryn, we called police on three occasions and they dealt with the problem but the next day a member of the public thought it had not been dealt with."

Issues of data protection also meant that many of the results generated by CCTV could not be publicised, he added.