On a Monday morning last April, security guard Roy Grey and his colleague Reg Johnson made a routine visit to the Halifax bank in Newport, Wales. As Grey entered the bank, two masked men grabbed him and demanded money. As the drama unfolded, witnesses took pictures with their mobile phones, providing vital clues for police that later helped convict three people.

Detective chief inspector Mark Sutton told BBC News: “We had members of the public who stood there at the time the robbery took place, taking photographs with mobile phones. It was a tremendous response.”

As the sale of camera phones increases – by 2009, four billion camera phones will have been sold worldwide – we will, most likely, see more of these kinds of stories appearing in the media. Tony Henning, senior analyst at Future Image in San Mateo, who has been closely following the camera phone phenomenon, says a lot has happened in terms of camera phones and public safety since the technology was introduced in 2000.

“If you look back less than four years ago to the World Trade Center disaster, the only video from this tragedy comes from a couple of video photographers who happened to be making a documentary about fire-fighters in New York City at the time,” he says.

“Nowadays, whenever there is a major news event, the most immediate – and sometimes the only coverage of it – often comes from people with camera phones. If you take, for instance, the London train bombings last July, all the major newspapers and TV stations used camera phone images and videos provided by the public to cover the disaster.”

Camera phones are not only used to solve crimes and document disasters, they are also useful in recording anti-social behaviour, Henning says. “There was an incident on a bus in Hong Kong recently where a man was talking loudly on his mobile. A young man, sitting behind him, politely asked his fellow passenger to keep his voice down but, instead of saying sorry, the man went ballistic, yelling and screaming at him. The whole incident was captured by a camera phone and later posted on the internet where it has, to date, been viewed two million times.”

Henning says the opportunity to record anti-social behaviour and crime has never been greater, but he points out that the use of camera phones will not always stop incidents happening. He says: “There are already surveillance cameras and alarm systems in place in people’s homes but that hasn’t stopped people from robbing them. But, I think other crimes, such as abductions and flashing, which take place in public, can be deterred by camera phones. We have already seen evidence of that.”

As much as people have the opportunity to record crimes, or prevent crimes from happening altogether, the new mobile technology also presents the opportunity for abuse. “There is always a percentage of the population who will misuse such tools,” Henning says. For example, there have been incidents where people have taken their camera phones into courtrooms to photograph witnesses so they can retaliate against them later.

But most of these have been isolated incidents and actions have been taken to ban the use of camera phones in such places to protect the public. “Society will, slowly but surely, get used to people having their cameras with them all the time and there will be rules for where we can and cannot use them. I think it is just a matter of us catching up to the technology and using it properly,” Henning says.

When it comes to the future of camera phones, Henning believes the technology will only get better and that camera phones will eventually replace digital cameras in many picture-taking situations. “There is an enormous amount of development and innovation going on, from the lens to the artificial lighting,” he says. Henning also believes future camera phones will have special public safety features. “I think, for instance, there will be a feature on these phones that will give people the opportunity to take a picture and, with one touch of a button, send it to an emergency number.”

Because a mobile phone is now multi-faceted, Henning believes it will be around for a very long time and that, he says, is very good news for public safety. “When people are asked what they cannot live without, most people say their mobile. They are dependant on their phone and that’s key for public safety – that so many people carry their camera with them all the time,” he says. “It will be extremely rare in the coming years when any kind of event, whether a crime or a natural disaster, is not recorded and those recordings will most likely be done by phone.”

Torunn Hansen-Tangen