LONDON -- Questions about the city's readiness to host the Olympics have centered on a shortage of guards, but the backbone of London's security system has nothing to do with gun-toting soldiers and police officers.
The city has pioneered the use of closed circuit television surveillance cameras which have played major roles, from tracking common criminals to terrorist bombers, including the four men who carried out the devastating attack on the city's subway and bus systems in 2005, the day after London was awarded the 2012 Summer Games.
"We would never have been able to resolve it as quickly without CCTV," former London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair said in an interview with USA TODAY Sports.
Within days of the attack, Blair said investigators had images of the four suicide bombers on their way to carry out the assaults, all captured by cameras set up throughout the city's rail system. The cameras also picked up evidence the bombers had conducted a trial run before the July 7 attacks which killed 52 people along with the bombers.
Bernard Melekian, the U.S. Justice Department's director of Community Oriented Policing Services, said London's quick success in tracking the origins of the attack "sent a signal to American policing" about how camera use could be widely applied.
"The real boost (in camera application in the U.S.) came after the subway bombings there," Melekian said.
In the U.S., Melekian said former Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and current New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly were among the first to recognize the benefit of increased camera surveillance, based on the London model.
In London, surveillance cameras are a ubiquitous feature on the urban landscape.
They hang from light poles, street signs, building facades, train station entrances and exits. They also are featured prominently across the Olympic venues, from the vast Olympic Park to the Olympic Stadium.
Blair declined to provide the number of cameras available to law enforcement. But the BBC has reported, quoting the research of academics known as the Surveillance Studies Network, that the number of closed circuit cameras in Britain is more than 4 million.
In its own report earlier this year, civil rights advocates known as Big Brother Watch, found that there were more than 51,000 cameras just under the control of local borough officials throughout Britain -- a number that does not include those used by police agencies throughout the country or the federal government.
The group called the massive deployment a "haphazard and badly measured rush to spy on citizens," adding that Britain had become "the most watched nation of people anywhere in the world."
But Blair, who served as commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police for four years before leaving in late 2008, said the British people are now "quite used" to the camera presence and "surprisingly comfortable with it."
"The people of Britain have a long history of being quite rebellious," Blair said. "But they have adapted to CCTV in a way that is reasonably extraordinary."
