From the November 2007 issue of Professional Security Magazine: the editor’s luncheon.
The latest editor’s luncheon had the usual ingredients: a fine and convenient venue, good food and drink, and a room of UK security people talking. Mark Rowe, who could hardly get a word in, reports.
Who was there, at the Walbrook in the City of London: LISTEN email group organiser Mark Hanna, of Nomura International plc; David Herd, Security Co-ordinator at 100 Victoria Embankment; Phil Gilbert, Group Security Manager, Schroders; Alan French, who like Phil works on Gresham Street in EC2V, at Investec Bank (UK); Roy Cooper, MD of Professional Security; Simon Ghent, UK Security Manager of law firm Linklaters. And sitting on either side of me were Peter Currie, Business Development Manager, and David Markland of CCTV manufacturers Vigilant Technology, the lunch sponsors. Also invited was Mike Alexander, Global Head of Business Security and Safety, Henderson Global Investors, who had to say no when a meeting came up.
So there was a different, corporate and banking feel to the lunch, compared with the previous one, when retail loss prevention people discussed video content analysis. The topic this time was more general: CCTV in the workplace, and it wasn’t long before the conversation was well away. Kicking the lunch off – not the right phrase to use, admittedly, as he admits he knows nothing about football – Mark Hanna mentioned Prof Martin Gill’s 2005 national evaluation of CCTV for the Home Office, and the more recent question of carbon footprints: is CCTV worth the electricity, because it’s a reactive technology, unless someone is sitting there, monitoring. "It’s a great topic to choose, purely for the fact that there are both good and arguable aspects to it. The system we use has been a great asset with regards to the clarity during investigations, which has led to a number of successful convictions"
It’s worth stepping back to make the point about what was not said, as much as what was said. No-one at the lunch is anti-CCTV. Everyone is a user; but use depends on environment. At an investment bank for example you work according to a regulator’s – the Financial Services Authority’s (FSA) – rules about CCTV and access control, different from another blue-chip site.
One of the lunchers described his workplace, a corporate headquarters now taking in tenants. One aspect to the place is a public area within. So CCTV may not be needed only for access control, but for monitoring the public space. The suggestion, then: CCTV for a building rather than being generic should be installed for a particular building, and its users and uses may change, meaning to run the building, there may be a need for more or differently-sited cameras. Another diner replied: "The problem is, you have consultants coming in, looking purely from a business point of view, what they think is right." This issue of who says what CCTV should go where – the person using the cameras should get a say, and where do consultants get their ideas from anyway? – came up later.
Alan French, as a facilities manager at a bank, said: "I am interested in how many around the table have cameras on their trading floor." Which prompted the comment: what would someone hope to gain by having a camera on a dealer floor? You can’t see what people are saying. The answer: you aren’t allowed to use a mobile phone on a dealer floor. In the financial sector. You need to be an authorised user of a mobile phone within your building. If you are a dealer and using a mobile phone on a dealer floor, it could be you are an insider dealer; hence that risk.
If we had invited people from the world of horse racing, or indeed cricket, they may have had something to add about how to police, similarly, a weighing room or dressing room, the places where jockeys and others are just before a race. There the CCTV use would be to combat inside information getting out to affect betting. Maybe one lunch we will have to invite people from wildly different backgrounds.
It wasn’t long before human rights came into the conversation, as someone asked: "Are you in breach if a camera is covering someone eating their lunch at their desk?" Another question: is CCTV the way to stop mobile phones on the dealer floor?
Generally speaking, diners agreed on the worth of CCTV in providing evidence. Casinos and shop tills come to mind; but in the lunch, a corporate example is the clear-desk. So if someone’s laptop has gone, and there is a dispute about who has taken it, there is evidence. Or if someone has tried to retrieve confidential waste from a bin. To return to the thread of the conversation, yes, everyone takes personal calls on a mobile, but, as one of the diners said: "If there is a question about an illegal deal that the person has been involved in, you can then go back to the CCTV. That is how he has done the deal; there is the evidence." Evidence, he added, to show compliance.
But CCTV as more than an evidential tool – as a policing tool as action is still unfolding, on a fast-moving dealer floor? More difficult, those in that field agreed. There is also to consider what is important to the company: the dealers can do whatever they like – play golf there – if they make money. And CCTV is reactive: "At times, CCTV might as well not be there." And how important are some of the things a review of CCTV footage is asked for? Theft of someone’s pear, from their office desk?!
Alan French: "I think it [CCTV] is a huge deterrent." Yes, much CCTV is reactive, but what of the general public, walking the streets of the City of London, seeing local authority and on-street businesses’ cameras. People out there see the cameras, they might think they’re being monitored, but do they understand CCTV? And to be sure, there’s a great deal of CCTV in the City. Before crossing into Walbrook itself, I spied a Dennard fixed camera looking at a delivery gate around the corner from Cannon Street station; on Cannon Street itself, the public space pan and tilt camera with four loudspeakers, each with pins on top to put off climbers (or pigeons?); on Walbrook, a fixed Computar camera looking at a pizzeria’s diners; next door, a Rampart Security-installed camera ; at the top of the street, The Mansion House, and cameras on one side of the building, looking at the pavement and the black Rolls-Royce waiting for the Lord Mayor to come out the door. Joe Public has a pair of eyes, and can take photographs around London, but what are the photos of – the CCTV?
Next topic: signage. So many places in central London are listed. Is a brass plaque, in keeping with the building, to say it has CCTV, enough, as at least one diner says he has? Should someone go around with a screwdriver, fitting a Data Protection Act-complaint A4-sized sign that says who is managing the system, and who to phone if you want to request footage, and what purposes the CCTV is for – staff safety, crime prevention, whatever? I should have looked for no smoking signs in our venue, The Walbrook. If it had anything so vulgar on the wall, it wasn’t in your face. There are ways of doing such things, aren’t there? And one of the joys of London is that these oases abound, and you bump into them. As Alan French emailed afterwards: " I walk past there daily and never knew it existed." It’s easy to see why, because it’s set back – it’s next to a Starbucks, but more of a contrast would be hard to find. It’s timelessly classic and special without being furnished in a set period. Our dining room had prints and framed photographs including one of TE Lawrence (of Arabia). In the basement gents, I wondered if it was right to pee in the urinals, they looked so artistic. In the room where we gathered – England were losing a game of 2020 cricket on a plasma screen – behind the bar was a model of an ocean liner behind glass. Outside our upstairs room, there was the faintest rumble of the city, yet through the net curtains I could see the chain of a crane at work on the building site next door. The City of London is never still.
But to return to CCTV signage. As one diner said: "You can walk around any building within half a mile radius and there are many different types and forms of signage." But, others agreed, if a bank gives footage to police of an incident – criminal damage, say – outside their doors, in court a good lawyer will ask where the footage has come from, is it compliant, and it’s thrown out. And if you’re a bank whose on-street cameras can view the bank across the road, and vice versa, does that mean your control room staff, if there under contract, need a public space surveillance (CCTV) licence from the Security Industry Authority? Someone around the table gave the opinion that the SIA website is non-committal on that question. Looking afterwards at the SIA website, it advises that a licence is required for manned guarding activities that use CCTV to ‘monitor the activities of a member of the public in a public or private place … but excludes the use of CCTV solely to identify a trespasser or protect property’.
So we were agreed – someone quoted the Prof Martin Gill study – CCTV by itself does not deter crime. What you can do is learn from what you see. Roy Cooper made the point that if CCTV is installed, some people think that’s all you need to do – Prof Gill’s argument being that people aren’t using their CCTV well … or indeed at all. Someone made the point: the driver of a lorry of explosives is not worried about being caught on camera.
One of the key comments, for me, of the lunch: "I am sure we speak for the majority of the industry when we say this: when a system is going to be installed, they rarely come to the corporate security manager or the equivalent, and say, what do you think?"
Then I got a word in, to ask if there was a happy medium in use of CCTV and humans, between the two extremes of no CCTV – having all meet and greet reception people – and all CCTV, having visitors enter by using an intercom and remotely-monitored CCTV operating the access control system. Alan French: "CCTV will support what the security officer sees."
"Can I just say, bon appetit," Roy Cooper said, for the starters arrived. I had chosen salmon. David Markland of Vigilant said: "CCTV goes well beyond standard security issues." He suggested it’s a management tool, giving the retail example of a warehouse that saw claims reduced so much that the saving paid for the investment on CCTV. The conversation began to spread from strictly CCTV to what security managers do, and how CCTV fits in. Is security management all that the security manager does now? Their work can take in health and safety, operational risk, and compliance, as all-round managers, users of the systems available. So how does CCTV or indeed other equipment save manpower? "In effect, it doesn’t, because the system can always fail. A human can always fail. Then you have the human back-up, to check around your building." Peter Currie of Vigilant took the point, saying that control room managers might see having fewer members of staff as a way of saving money, but video analytics products require people, to act on the information.
Opinion here differed. While one person felt CCTV provides comfort to the client, someone else gave the example of a member of staff asking Security in vain to catch a pear thief. The owner missing their lunchtime fruit might demand, why are we paying for CCTV? Town centre CCTV doesn’t stop people having fights. Peter Currie said that images going to police dispatchers are of such quality that rather than the dispatchers doubting the word of CCTV operators, the dispatchers can indeed see, for example, a knife. Peter’s colleague David Markland added: "We are now in an age where we are looking at megapixel cameras. I don’t think CCTV has necessarily had a reduction in crime, but it has delayed the increase in crime."
Phil Gilbert raised the number of UK CCTV cameras, four or five million; however many million it is. Who knows? Yet, someone noted, you still have people with an ASBO, as a badge of honour; and drunks, who don’t care about cameras. CCTV doesn’t always have an immediate effect, one of the diners said, "although I do believe it has an immediate effect if you monitor it all the time," or if you investigate your recordings. Alan French brought up the recent [mid-September] BBC1 Panorama programme where police spoke of how few officers were on patrol.
David Herd offered what for me was a key point: "It’s a tool, whether it’s proactive, reactive. Humans are humans, they are going to do the crime, whatever they do. In western countries you have higher rates of CCTV; people still do the crime."
What if the tool is attached to another, a loudspeaker, and you have ‘talking CCTV’, as hailed (pardon the pun) by the Home Office earlier this year, whereby some local authority CCTV operators can speak to people fighting, dropping litter, and so on, within earshot? Might some respond with a ‘so what’ gesture!? From the product company’s point of view, David Markland said: "The more CCTV technology develops, the more innovative manufacturers become." He gave the example of road speed cameras; instead of a flash camera capturing your speed at one place, cameras can plot average speed now. Certainly diners could think of applications where more sophisticated CCTV analysis could find a welcome market: software to search for a lost child in a shopping centre; or to go through an enormous amount of gathered footage, if only to reduce (say) 10,000 hours to 200 hours with some matching features worth a human looking closer at.
The conversation, then, was going where the diners took it, straying from CCTV in the workplace. Security managers, true, have more at their fingertips than CCTV: intruder alarms, access control. Integrated systems are the way forward, one diner argued, because that will be the intelligent system. Which brought us to Internet Protocol (IP) CCTV. We liked the idea of being able to log in from home or elsewhere, and look at a building. If there is an incident, by logging in remotely, the manager can judge what to do, whether to go into work. Or if there has been an incident that has caused the business continuity plan to go into operation, and the business is running from a DR (disaster response) centre. When the emergency services say the business can return to their office, IP CCTV can allow you to see for yourself.
The main course was served. I had the fish and chips and mushy peas, with half a lemon in a bag to squeeze. Most of us chose the steak. The talk turned to what consultants, salesmen, integrators, the people to do with CCTV, do to keep up with the technology. Visit IFSEC? There are the consequences of products too – even before you buy them. There was given an example from IT security; a salesman offering a box free for a month. The IT department might think that a great idea, something for nothing. But what is the other person getting?! And then there are the ‘hi, how are you!’ phone calls from people who would like to give you a quote on your security, and they haven’t even seen your site.
Simon Ghent felt that the last dozen years have seen a change; security managers were meeting and talking more, sharing, rather than being afraid of having contracts stolen. What someone termed ‘the 9-11 effect’ brought an end to security managers not talk to nearby counterparts, it was suggested. After 9-11, you had emergency first aid kits, for use if necessary by neighbours. And besides 9-11, people realised the use of networking with others.
Simon Ghent mentioned Barbican Office Watch, one of the watch groups in the City of London – others cover other wards, and pubs and hotels. Over sandwiches, every three or six months, it’s a way to get a police briefing, to learn. Because, for one thing; should the end user trust what he is told by an installer – when an installer may well never have heard of ‘return on investment’? If you have the same contractor for many years, do you know any more what the rest of the market is like? And, as one manager argued, the security managers has to be an IT security manager as much as physical security manager. IT and sales people will use phrases to confuse you, so you have to become IT-literate.
As David Herd remarked shrewdly: "That is the nature of the security manager job. Investigate." So that you make an informed decision. If a supplier quotes you a 15 per cent rise, but the average in the market is 12pc, you can make an informed decision. He added: "After 9-11, you are right. Everyone jumped out of their comfort zone." Which brought us to the Security Industry Authority. You will recall Mark Hanna’s article in the January issue of Professional Security [‘Sceptical about guard standards’] when he voiced scepticism that licences had brought about change – put another way, that some clients were paying little for guards and getting guards asleep or half-asleep.
Bearing that in mind, and while I had the chance I jumped in with what for me has been a nagging question: security is a service. How do measure a service, whether it is CCTV or a human guard? Because it’s the way of the world that there are budgets; how then to justify CCTV?
Phil Gilbert gave another of the afternoon’s key quotes: "You can’t speak to a camera, you can’t negotiate with a camera. You can only talk to a security officer or a front of house person. At the end of the day, it has got to be a decision of the company whether they want somebody to talk to or somebody to watch them."
There are, it was suggested, ways of measuring such as the number of stolen laptops. If the number is less one year than the year before, then there is the lower reputational risk, and the lower cost of replacing laptops. So you can review savings to the company, seek to justify Security’s existence. It depends on the size of the building you are looking after. One manager described how his security officers have to be pretty IT literate, because they are working on computers. "They will take a turn in the day because we rota them a maximum of an hour so they don’t spend more than an hour at a desk or a door. They are printing out a page or giving you a temporary access card; so they are going on to the [computer] system. Type your name and see you still work for the company. They have to send out emails, asking you to send a card back again. I think we are becoming more qualified, competent. We have to." That was identified as a change inside the City, security staff having more complicated, information technology, things to do. It might be different elsewhere.
That was contrasted with the old days when the security person was there for insurance purposes, and an officer was fed up and phoning his wife on the client telephone. Today the email means that if someone comes into the office and sees the security officer ‘droopy’ – well, you can come up with your own word – they will e-mail someone to say so. (Maybe mail lots of people!?) "And after 9-11 people are more security-aware." While you have the CCTV, and electronic side, and building management systems, without the man supporting the systems, the smiling front of the business, you have nothing.
One diner gave an example of man and technology. A building management system, linked into security, sends an email to security if there is something the matter, and pages an engineer. If all the engineers are out, the security control room calls the engineer to ask if they have the page. "So we have got to the stage now where the security officer is becoming more capable. We have a 24-hour building; we now want security guards to start issuing and checking meeting rooms and moving meeting rooms, on the computer system." Rather than someone being on call to fill the photocopiers on a Saturday, why not a security guard do it? If asked to switch on an overhead projector, why not, rather than an IT engineer?
While diners did not reject the idea of a security team taking more responsibility, doing more for the business, some suggested that Security has to be careful when showing such helpfulness. As someone put it: who is doing the security? Or is there capacity? You have to draw a line, the consensus seemed to be, between adding value and having your security staff running around so much that they are no doing any security. Yes, the security department may be the first point of contact for any incident not to do with IT – from a road accident outside to contaminated water – but Security might not be able to do something about everything. The question, then: is the security guardforce a source of out of hours labour, or providing added value? Views differed. Coming back to CCTV, if a new system is installed, the security department wants training and a manual how to operate the system; little leaflets from a few years ago are no good.
Alan French asked about the quality and reward for the security guard. "Does a guard enjoy his role, is he being paid the correct rate?"
Simon Ghent: "It’s now becoming a proper job. A 42-hour week. They [guards] are getting paid better; they have been put into suits. Maybe because they have a licence it feels like a proper job now." Or is guarding a proper job because the officers are more trained, or educated. And by education, that can mean briefing the security team on what’s happening today in the building. Another way of looking at it may be drawing on officers’ talents, whether from past jobs or hobbies. One manager did speak of a member of staff who was a graphic designer, who in spare time during shifts made promotional posters in the company’s style about security awareness.
Alan French had to leave, the meal over, as he had to go before 3pm. The conversation ranged yet farther, for instance on the peril of throwing your business card into a prize draw at an exhibition stand at IFSEC. Is that why you as an end user get sales calls and emails from everywhere? Might the day come when just as lifts now say ‘second floor – doors opening’ and so on, CCTV will detect litter dropping and say, ‘please do not drop litter’. But; security departments fear that jobs will be lost as a result. Even as Roy Cooper sought to bring the afternoon to a close, conversation broke out again, and I took the chance to pick up a point about security people talking to each other. Take retail for example. And not just the shop security officer and store detective from rival shops on the same high street looking out for one another, responding to each other’s calls. To mention the LISTEN email group, that the diners are members of, it has members from every field, public and private sector, in-house and contract security, from offices to hotels and financial services. Authoritative information is passed around about topics of common interest, such as terrorism; the same goes for the seminars that LISTEN runs. The last one, in July, was about executive protection. Some material sent and broadcast may only be of interest to, say, hotels. But the crimes and trends affecting hotels one day may move to banks and pubs tomorrow. Knowledge, as someone said, is power.
I was struck yet again by the truth that there are two sides to every argument. One diner said that the Data Protection Act needed to be not so tight; another argued that it needs to be tighter, so that the security industry shows itself as professional. Also striking was that modern life has so much data that may be relevant to the security practitioner. How then to sift the data, quickly enough so that it is of use? Whether CCTV or words, whether about terrorism or thefts by cleaners, you suspect. If a theft is reported, the cleaning contractor may be told and the suspect may disappear; but to work somewhere else?
The lunch was not supposed to answer these questions, but to bring people together. Two diners ended up offering to compare building emergency procedures, which may range from what to do if people are trapped in a lift, to what to do if there’s a shooting outside. The advice; keep working on those SOPs (standard operating procedures) and look back after each situation, to see how the SOP worked in the eventuality. Because why re-invent the wheel?! If something works for someone, there is a good chance it will work for you.
We had had coffee, and refills. We filed out, shook hands, went down the stairs – stair-rods held the carpet in place. Outside the sun shone. Standing on the Tube by a carriage door, at a station I heard an automated announcement: "For your safety and security, CCTV is in use throughout London Underground."
