Local authority CCTV has a future – and not just the big city systems, a visit to a town scheme suggests. Mark Rowe reports.
People say things, not only when they speak. And it dawned on me inside the Coalville council CCTV control room that the elected councillors, and police, were going out of their way to (literally) stand by the CCTV. I’d arranged to see Gary Hill, the North West Leicestershire District Council (NWLDC) CCTV manager – to be exact, the job title on his card is operations and security manager. But I was introduced to council officers, Councillor Trevor Pendleton, the council’s portfolio holder for community, and the town police inspector Chris Brown. And while, as you can read, they said good things about CCTV, it was striking that on this rainy summer morning they were taking the trouble just to be here because I was. Because, as reported in recent issues, CCTV has come in for stick, as being too intrusive; or, not preventing crime (presumably not intruding enough on the criminals?!). The 1990s central government hailing by both main political parties of CCTV to tackle town centre crime and disorder has faded. Local government budgets, usually tight, are likely to become only more so in any economic slowdown, and CCTV, community safety, neighbourhood policing, all must compete with schools, libraries and so on for funds. The central government capital spend that built control rooms like Coalville’s is long in the past. Equipment meanwhile does not get any newer and needs replacing. Can small local authorities afford it, or can only big city councils? Might district councils have to give up their own monitoring, and instead feed images to a city hub? A visit to Coalville however belied such a glum future for public space CCTV. <br><br>I visited Coalville partly to balance Professional Security’s coverage of the big city control rooms – over the years, we’ve reported on Sheffield, Nottingham, London boroughs, and Northampton, where Gary Hill used to be CCTV manager of the 500-camera system. Gary has a framed photograph from Northampton on the wall, besides a photo of Stephen Gerrard taking a corner kick, and other Liverpool Football Club pictures. He started at NWLDC in January 2007 doing a three-day a week review of the system. He has settled in the district so no longer makes the commute up the M1 from Northampton. <br><br>The NWLDC system already has digital recording – three Integral DVX recorders, from Andover Controls as it was, now TAC, as featured in our February 2004 issue. Gary wants to go to a PC front end – ‘it will make it far easier for the operators’ – and to replace seven monitors of a dozen-monitor wall with four plasma screens. And the council has bid successfully to the county council for money to do that, ultimately from the central government Safer and Stronger Communities Fund. That’s not only, or particularly, for CCTV, but for any local authority work against crime, anti-social behaviour and drugs. <br><br>While it’s easy – indeed, meritworthy – in security management to talk to other security managers, security people forget at their peril that they are providing a service, to others, whether a business or a public body. Leaving aside party politics – for the record, last year control of North West Leicestershire went from Labour to the Conservatives – local government like many other walks of life is a world of its own. Briefly, CCTV is part of the Town Centres unit in the Environment Directorate; there are links with Neighbourhoods and Communities but in the council structure CCTV comes under the Environment Directorate. It was welcome, then, to have the chance to hear Trevor Pendleton, not a CCTV specialist but an elected councillor, on CCTV. The way he puts it: if people are law-abiding, there’s no problem: "They are being looked after, in the nicest sense, not being spied on." The CCTV is out to catch and prosecute the villains. <br><br>He is chairman of the North West Leicestershire Partnership in Safer Communities, which gained the cash for the CCTV upgrade, among other ‘Neighbourhoods and Communities’-related projects. CCTV, then, remains for the citizens – indeed, as Trevor put it: "We would be failing in our duty if we didn’t offer it." Insp Chris Brown too described CCTV as welcome for crime prevention and detection. Anything in particular? I asked: night-time economy, retail crime? He said: "The advantage is it [CCTV] is there and it can be used for a variety of things. With our partners we are targetting the night-time economy – it’s one of our priorities. I know Gary runs a very professional ship." He too, spoke of CCTV not prying on the public. I have to admit – and it is not Chris Brown’s fault – but I have been unnerved by meeting local senior police in control rooms since at Kidderminster Harriers Football Club the town chief inspector turned out to be the younger brother of my sister’s friend at school, once smaller than me, now towering above. There is a moral in that. But seriously, that chief inspector, too, spoke of working in partnership. Partner-work has become too ingrained to be upset by general media complaints; in any case, as Chris Brown said, police and partners work according to protocols, appreciating that doing things right and being seen to do so is the way to reassure people. One small point: the Leicestershire police force is divided into three basic command units, each divided into several local policing units. One is North West Leicestershire, in other words, the same boundary as the council. As Chris Brown neatly put it: "When we are around the table, we are all talking about the same area." <br><br>Indeed one priority for Gary is to make a live video link to force headquarters at Enderby a dozen miles away. That way, police despatch controllers can see what the Coalville control room operator is talking about. "It then takes the onus off the [the CCTV] operators to make judgements." I put it another way: say there is a rumpus outside a pub, with a live feed the police can decide whether to send two cars, or one officer? After all the despatch controllers are the experts at sending the right response to a call, because it could prove as unfortunate for police control to send too large a response, as much as too small a response. <br><br>Next priority for Gary: to replace the seven-year-old digital recorders, currently recording the 30 cameras at three or four frames a second. He hopes to go up to 12.5 frames per second, retaining for 31 days across the board. For the operator’s console, the plan is to record real time with seven days’ retention. Within those seven days, police will have the chance to collect the real time footage; if not, there is the 12.5 fps recording. <br><br>Gary went on: "I still come into contact with CCTV systems using VCRs; and there’s nothing wrong with videotapes, nothing whatsoever." Hence he plans to upgrade the review suite next door to the control room, allowing the council to burn a town retailer’s VCR recording to DVD, so that a court can view it as evidence. Something Gary has in mind is automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) – the subject of Professional Security’s article on Northampton CCTV in June 2001. And Trevor Pendleton raised fly-tipping. That is a quality of life and environmental health issue for many district councils, and something voters complain to their local councillor about if it happens in their area. <br><br>I stood with Trevor Pendleton and Gary Hill in the corridor – the control room and adjoining rooms being purpose-built, with airlock, static cameras and so on, in a former nightclub. As for this question of whether a fairly small system like Coalville’s can keep going or might be centralised, it’s already a central point. Nine cameras in the nearby market town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch once monitored at Ashby police station are transmitted to Coalville by BT fibre. Also monitored is the Agar Nook housing estate on the edge of town. Trevor Pendleton was emphatic about monitoring staying in the district, and here is why: "There wouldn’t be the buy-in from our traders, if we out-sourced, took it elsewhere. If we want the thing to work, it’s got to be here, locally, and accountable. It’s got to be us." So that was the non-CCTV specialist’s view; Coalville CCTV has to have a Coalville flag stuck on it, if you like. Gary, the CCTV specialist, said he had no qualms about CCTV centres being linked together – for one thing, if a town or city needs to be evacuated, just when the CCTV is most needed, you do not want to have to give it up for lack of connectivity. But you can’t get local knowledge from an operator working 150 miles away, that know-how of what short cuts a thief will run down to escape. I took the chance to mention volunteer CCTV operators as used by some local authorities, in the south west for instance, as featured in the camera and dome supplement with the September issue of Professional Security. Yes, it saves money. But again, Trevor Pendleton was quite emphatic: you would have to invest in volunteers to the same level as staff; so why go down the road of volunteers? <br><br>The weather was still wet; it was a day for using the wipers on the shoebox cameras. The outlook for Coalville’s CCTV however looks bright. "For the next few years I’m going to be busy!" Gary said.<br><br>Pictured above: From left to right, Auzra Flynn (Neighbourhoods and Communities Head of Service at North West Leicestershire District Council), Trevor Pendleton (Councillor who holds community safety portfolio at NWLDC), Jen Thornton (Safer Communities Manager at NWLDC), Gary Hill (CCTV Manager NWLDC), Dave Johnson (Senior CCTV Operator NWLDC), Emily Todd (Town Centre Manager NWLDC).<br><br>Photo courtesy of North West Leicestershire District Council
