DESPITE their tragic nature, the murders last week of six-year-old Teonia Henry and 17-year-old Kingston College student Khajeel Mais offer two more compelling reasons for greater availability of technology to law enforcement.

We speak here of a data network across all State agencies accessible to the police, complemented by GPS systems and closed circuit TV (CCTV) footage gathered from major intersections and thoroughfares islandwide.

The police, we know, already have access to motor vehicle registration data, and they do monitor CCTV footage in the course of their duties.

However, closed circuit TV cameras are not mounted in as many locations as necessary to effectively aid the police in their jobs.

The technology, we accept, can be costly to implement on the scale we suggest, and in an economy with very pressing demands for services such as health, water, education and vital road infrastructure the investment in CCTV is understandably not quite urgent.

But security, we must agree, is of utmost importance, because societies that are relatively safe experience the spin-off benefits of investments that translate into jobs which, in turn, lead to reductions in crime.

In Britain, for instance, which we are told has up to 4.2 million CCTV cameras — about one for every 14 people — we saw the benefits of the technology after the attempted bombings of July 21, 2005. In that case, CCTV footage released by the Metropolitan Police aided in the arrests and eventual conviction of four men who had attempted to replicate suicide bombings that had killed 52 people two weeks earlier in London.

In the ideal circumstances that we advocate, maybe the murder last Friday of young Mr Mais on Highland Drive in Havendale, St Andrew would not have been caught on camera. After all, that road is not really a major thoroughfare.

However, the killer would most likely have passed through a major intersection after fleeing the scene of his crime, and would thus have been captured by CCTV which, we are sure, would give the police licence plate information and allow them to move in much more quickly on the suspect.

We’re not here saying that the technology is perfect and not prone to technical failure. However, its effectiveness in detecting criminal acts has been proven in other jurisdictions which have used the images to successfully prosecute offenders.

We have no doubt that any attempt to increase the number of CCTV cameras in public spaces will meet opposition from rights groups who will argue that they violate people’s right to privacy.

However, as a country we need to decide whether the right to privacy — on public streets no less — is more important than our own security.

The answer, to us, is very clear.