In June 1999, we brought a report on Birmingham Citywatch – Britain’s founding city centre CCTV scheme, the pioneering partnership between public and private sectors. In our September 2001 print edition, we returned to England’s Second City to look at yet more joined-up thinking to bring integrated anti-crime surveillance on Brum’s transport network – with the prospect of yet more links between CCTV systems.
Consultant Redvers Hocken explains: "The criminal knows no boundary." The vandal, thief and attacker will carry out a crime that may be covered by a CCTV surveillance system, and he may pass into an area covered by another CCTV system, but unless those systems are talking to each other, in good time, the criminal is not picked up. "Control rooms, historically, rarely talk to each other, or pass intelligence. By integrating them, you have a single point, so intelligence can be gathered. It’s the key. It means tapes are recorded in a single, safe, secure environment, which is very important because of the Data Protection Act." That’s the thinking behind integration of public transportation CCTV in Birmingham by Centro, the transport authority. Centralising control and information saves time – previously, if British Transport Police wanted CCTV tape footage of an incident at a suburban rail station, an officer would have to go to that station to pick up the tape recorded locally, meaning a delay in investigation of that incident. Now British Transport Police have a playback facility within the control room and a staff member whose role is to review tapes. What’s more, central monitoring of Birmingham’s commuter railway car parks and stations works. Crime against cars where car parking is covered by cameras and security lighting has plummeted.
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Redvers Hocken, technical adviser for Birmingham Citywatch, is a security consultant on many large projects such as town and shopping centre CCTV schemes, based in south Birmingham. It’s a good place to consider how security – or the lack of it – across a city’s public spaces can have profound knock-on effects. Say for example that a city seeks to boost public transport use, for all kinds of good reasons: if commuters perceive their local railway car parks to be too unsafe, they will prefer to take their cars into the city centre, scuppering the transport strategy, and hitting the bottom line of the train operators. About seven years ago, Redvers Hocken Associates (RHA) put CCTV into some Birmingham station car parks much used by commuters, such as Northfield and King’s Norton. The cameras were monitored locally by ticket office staff – not a most satisfactory solution, because despite training security monitoring was not the main job of those employees. Today, nearly two dozen stations have been fitted with CCTV, largely JVC pan and tilt cameras, with fixed cameras for the ticket offices. RHA are working on another 23 stations. RHA has won the consultancy contract with Centro for the next three years. "The new exciting aspect is that we are going to add a new dimension, not only CCTV at the new stations, but public address systems and help points. Both will work in conjunction with the cameras. This is going to offer some reassurance to users of the station car parks: a) the help point will allow the public to talk to the control room in an emergency and b) sometimes CCTV operators see youths loitering and can pre-empt a situation by saying ‘you have been identified, the police have been informed, please leave the car park’. What then are the security issues behind the installation’ Redvers Hocken talks in terms of safety, besides security. In the morning rush hour, there is some natural surveillance; not so in non-daylight hours. People on their own returning to their car may feel threatened and be fearful of crime. No two stations are alike; on the Jewellery Quarter line, stations are modern; but on other rail lines most stations are very old. Some stations have platforms on a different level to the ticket office, so that staff issuing tickets cannot see the platforms. In those cases cameras cover the platforms, walkways, stairs and stairwells, watching passengers from when they buy their ticket to when they get on a train. Whitlock’s End posed a particular challenge; unstaffed, it stands in open country, on the border with Warwickshire. There, the triangular car park has speed restrictors on the ground. It is proposed to fit pan and tilt cameras on poles to cover the parking areas and the walkways to the (unstaffed) station. "We intend to put help points on the platforms as well as the car park. On the platform there will be two buttons on the help point – one for train information that goes through to Central Trains, and the other one says ‘EMERGENCY’ and goes through to the control room." British Transport Police can respond by road or rail; if BTP cannot attend, the call is passed to West Midlands Police for response.
Integration is the key, Redvers Hocken stresses: "But the most important thing is being able to do something with the information", hence the Centro control room, a part of a Birmingham City Council CCTV control centre in central Birmingham. It’s well air-conditioned and uncramped. Two operators – city council staff, paid by Centro – each use a Baxall LM with joystick control to monitor images on a single screen in front of them in conjunction with the Cobyt (Control by Touch) CCTV management system from Petards. In a separate bank in front of their desk are JVC monitors – ten across by three high – that show mostly quad pictures of car parks, platforms, trains and Metro trams arriving and departing. Behind the operators is another ten by three bank of monitors yet to come into use. Set at 90 degrees to both is another bank, where city council operators monitor district shopping area CCTV – Alum Rock and Handsworth, to name two. In a tall cabinet, each Centro station has its own Panasonic video tape recorder for recording of footage. In a corner is a command and control desk, with another Cobyt touch-screen and Baxall LM controller. Redvers Hocken explains that the command desk is for the police to occupy in case of a disaster or evacuation, say, on the rail network. There a police officer can view, record and review any camera. There’s a Sony colour printer if police wish to make a hard copy print of a CCTV image; and a ClearView Unimux video de-multiplexer. All communications are by fibre; the control communications room, two doors away, is commendably neat. The only problem, which you find in so many CCTV installations, is that they are fast running out of room. Quadrant Video Systems plc. won the contract to install the control room; Quadrant Video Systems plc. and MEB Contracting Ltd. were involved in the installation of cameras. Redvers Hocken has written the procedure manuals and code of practice for the control room in compliance with the Data Protection Act. Each operator has a set of stations to cover; the operator generally instinctively knows where ‘his’ cameras are and what they are capable of seeing, without using the Cobyt touch-screen lay-outs of a station. Where Cobyt is useful is in training, and when a user for whatever reason (an incoming police operator during a serious incident, say) is unfamiliar with a station. Operators are rotated around the room, so that they stay as alert as possible.<br>
Centro is responsible for bus stations too. Redvers Hocken gives the example of Walsall bus station, with its innovative, planted ‘living roof’, where the first floor control room has natural surveillance over most of the busy station. Again, the security design has included help points and PA. Centro pay Walsall Metropolitan Council to monitor the cameras. At West Bromwich, where a new bus station is being built, Redvers Hocken is looking at the security aspects; there may well be a link with West Bromwich’s town centre CCTV, which Redvers Hocken is project-managing. He is looking also at the Wolverhampton to Birmingham Metro tram route which has stops in West Brom. The possibilities of security installations exchanging information, then, are real and great. Links are planned between the Centro control room and Railtrack’s CCTV control room at New Street station, and West Midlands Police control room, given that camera coverage at major stations such as Snow Hill and Moor Street may overlap with other public space systems outside the station. Centro control does have links with:<br>
– the British Transport Police control room;<br>
– the Metro control room in Wednesbury; and<br>
– Citywatch CCTV control room at Steelhouse Lane police station. (Professional Security reported in June about Citywatch’s trial with Visionics’ facial recognition.) Citywatch is the partnership between the city council, police and businesses, responsible for CCTV on the city centre main streets. The link means that Centro and Citywatch can freely exchange pictures of suspects as they pass from a station to a business centre zone. The prospects for integration go further: Citywatch surveillance ends in Broad Street, for example, bordering on CCTV coverage by the Fiveways Partnership, a stand-alone system covering the Fiveways shopping district.
In conclusion<br>
Our June 1999 feature on Citywatch ended by pointing to the ambitious aims of the partnership – to make the city centre safe and secure, for a better quality of life that is good for business. Centro, by securing train station car parks and stations, are working to the same ends. But there’s a bigger, city-wide picture. Criminals do not restrict themselves to public transport, a central business district, or a single retailer; in Birmingham, the authorities are recognising this reality by doing some joined up thinking and getting their security operations to integrate, for the good of all.
