It's well known that they are used to survey dates on the streets, and women walking around.
There was a long article a year back on the midland surveillance teams that allowed a writer in for a couple of days to central control and they turned out to be a large city-subsidized look-up-skirt operation run by very bored young men in the central office.

As to any view of crime etc. it did little if anything as an effect.

Most ordinary people started to do more things inside, so couch potatoes grew to avoid the annoyance of the turning cameras, looking much like the Martian invadors.