Oswestry Town Council in Shropshire that met last night had an agenda item about how West Mercia Police are changing their service. Mark Rowe comments that it’s part of a larger effort by police to be more careful in what they commit to. It means related public services will have to do more or be put to more trouble – and it may not even be in the police’s best interests.
The council was to consider a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the police force and the five council CCTV systems in the force area. As a background document for councillors explained, it will mean ‘that calls for service are appropriately screened at the first point of contact to determine whether the police service are the most appropriate agency to respond to that incident’. While West Mercia Police claimed to be ‘keen to support and encourage Local Government CCTV operators to assess all incidents’ the true reason for the MoU is that police want to avoid getting calls ‘where another agency is better placed to respond and where their [the other 999 service, let’s say] attendance would be expedited if they were called directly’. For example, if a CCTV operator is telling police about an on-street accident, the CCTV control room should ring for the ambulance service and not assume that police will call for an ambulance.
That’s reasonable enough; if an operator sees a medical emergency first, if they dial for an ambulance, the call has at least been made. The part of the MoU that is likely to do most harm to a council CCTV control room is that ‘CCTV operators will no longer routinely be allowed access to police radios’. As Tony Gleason of the Public CCTV Managers Association told the Security TWENTY conference at Heathrow last Thursday, most council CCTV control rooms have Airwave radios. That’s for a reason; police are the major ‘customer’ of council CCTV, whether liaising on a Saturday afternoon as away football fans make their way from a railway station to a football ground and back, or on a Friday or Saturday night to cover pubs, the regular round of public space events, such as Remembrance Sunday ceremonies, or the unexpected: what could be more natural than the council CCTV operator having an Airwave radio, to hear what police are doing, and to pass on useful info to police, whether seeking a suspect or a missing person? Even the 999 emergency number can leave you in a queue, let alone 101. Lives could depend on it.
If Airwave creates a problem for the police – quite apart from the cost of each radio, whether the police can trust the operator listening into sensitive operations – the police are not doing well at managing it; it routinely takes councils months to have operators vetted, and who will wait that long to be recruited?
The MoU also sets out when an operator should dial 999: ‘restricted to the following reasons’: ‘a serious offence is in progress or has just been committed’, ‘someone is in immediate danger, or ‘serious disruption to the public is occurring or is likely to occur’.
It’s a sign of police rowing back on what they do, to stick to what they have to do, to stay true to their oath. Two other recent signs have been: again, affecting local government CCTV, instead of police attending a control room in person to search video footage, and to take away a physical copy on disk or memory stick, police are expecting CCTV control rooms (and retailers and anyone else who may have a crime to report) to upload via hyperlink footage to the cloud. Police then may view the footage; or they may not bother. Certainly police are now expecting the control room operator to judge what’s the relevant footage; are police going to train the operator in that skill?
The other sign, trumpeted in midsummer, was the national ‘Right person, right care’ policy whereby police will not attend a mental health crisis; similarly, only if the incident is a police matter – a crime is in progress or there’s a threat to life. Again, the onus is on other services, in this case mental health, to attend. Will they in the small hours – because people in mental distress do not necessarily keep to office hours? Will the NHS and social services pick up the slack?
That police are de-equipping council CCTV is peculiar given that it goes against the grain of decades of British policing, finding crime remorselessly on the rise (no matter what the crime statistics say) and police desperate to have helpful partners. That’s as true for West Mercia, which for instance has recently partnered with bus operator Arriva, for police to patrol buses and bus stops more (see this link). Bus stations being liminal places are routinely hot-spots for anti-social behaviour and councils still with CCTV routinely have cameras there; why would police not want to make fullest use of council CCTV? Also to back work to combat violence against women and girls on nights out?
Ironically, in West Mercia, as elsewhere, police and crime commissioners are emerging as major investors in public space CCTV, given that local government is having trouble balancing the books. West Mercia’s PCC recently announced funding for new cameras in Telford and (ironically) Oswestry.
It’s understandable that police want to avoid being the ‘service of last resort’, that picks up (literally) the cases that other public services can’t or won’t, especially out of hours. It’s even for the best; police aren’t trained in mental health. Except that, without any MoU, the 999 services and other responders including private security ought to have an informal understanding: that they are on the same side, that they should ‘give and take’. If police – public servants paid for by tax-payers – insist on doing only what they are supposed to, what goodwill can they expect in return. If a lone police officer finds himself in trouble on a high street covered by 24-hour monitored CCTV, that cop may be glad of a council control room with Airwave.
Photo by Mark Rowe; West Mercia Police ‘CCTV is watching you’ campaign poster, 2022.
