Ranked: The World’s Most Surveilled Cities
This may come as a surprise, but it wasn’t until 2007 that the global urban population overtook the rural population. At that time, the two groups were split nearly 50/50, with around 3.3 billion people apiece.
Today, the percentage of people living in urban areas has grown to over 55%, and is expected to reach 68% by 2050. Due to this trend, many of the world’s largest cities have become home to tens of millions of people.
In response to such incredible density, governments, businesses, and households have installed countless security cameras for various purposes including crime protection. To grasp the scale of this surveillance, we’ve taken data from a recent report by Comparitech to visualize the most surveilled cities in the world.
The List (Excluding China)
Excluding China for the time being, these are the world’s 10 most surveilled cities.
| City | Population | Number of Cameras | Cameras per 1,000 people |
|---|---|---|---|
 Indore, India | 3.2M | 200,600 | 63 |
| Hyderabad, India | 10.5M | 440,299 | 42 |
| Delhi, India | 16.3M | 436,600 | 27 |
| Chennai, India | 11.5M | 282,126 | 25 |
 Singapore | 6.0M | 108,981 | 18 |
 Moscow, Russia | 12.6M | 213,000 | 17 |
 Baghdad, Iraq | 7.5M | 120,000 | 16 |
 London, UK | 9.5M | 127,373 | 13 |
| St. Petersburg, Russia | 5.5M | 70,000 | 13 |
 Los Angeles, U.S. | 3.9M | 34,959 | 9 |
Figures rounded
The top four cities all belong to India, which is the world’s second largest country by population. Surveillance cameras are playing a major role in the country’s efforts to reduce crimes against women.
Further down the list are cities (Read more...)