One of the threads running through the private security industry over the last few years, besides rapid technological change, is the bonding of the police and criminal justice systems with the private security sector, comments Mark Rowe.
One of the threads running through the private security industry over the last few years, besides rapid technological change, is the bonding of the police and criminal justice systems with the private security sector. The Security Industry Authority is that thread institutionalised. Yet it crosses my mind that the less Home Secretary David Blunkett has to hear about it when behind his desk, the happier he will be. I mean that he has enough on his plate already and a smoothly working SIA will run without having to come to the attention of the politicians’ radar very much. Mr Blunkett is a man in a hurry, with a mission. Initiatives to reduce crime flow from the Home Office. A consultation paper on entitlement cards (ID cards) one week, response to crime figures the next, reform of the police on the boil, ditto reform of the criminal justice system. Not that the private security industry will get credit for doing things competently – you never do. Take the Information Commissioner’s annual report on data protection (page 45 of the August print edition of Professional Security, and on this website). Barely a word about CCTV. Yet, as a CCTV trainer pointed out to me, I am sure that if you were to ask the Information Commissioner or her staff about CCTV, they would say that CCTV is very important to them, and so on. But, they are snowed under with work, and CCTV is, relatively speaking, keeping its house in order, so it’s not on the Office of the Information Commissioner radar. CCTV control room managers have to pat themselves on the back.
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Need for balance
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There’s a balance that has to be struck between the need for keeping records and keeping to proper procedures, to combat fraud and malpractice, and form-filling that goes beyond the necessary and holds you back from doing the job. Too few records and procedures can be as bad as too many – too few and staff have a licence to lounge or fiddle (see the article on the ‘human factor’, page 24, August print edition) and too many … well, ask anyone in the police, probation and prison services these days. Up to two hours for a police officer to process someone arrested, and no wonder police are reluctant to arrest anyone on a Friday night – they’re stretched enough as it is. Which leads us to …
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Man in hurry
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Among the gushing of daily new items from the Home Office, there are some relatively small pieces that show things as they really are. For instance, reported on page 30 of the August print edition of Professional Security, guidelines to retailers about when and how to arrest shoplifters. It’s a frank document, and an official one. The unspoken thread is – if you can possibly help it, don’t pass shoplifters on to us (the police and courts). Not if they’re very young, for instance. Never mind that this Government prides itself on what it calls ‘joined up’ government – catching juveniles hopefully before they fall into a cycle of ever less petty crime. If the official advice is not to bring very young shop thieves to the attention of the authorities, how can those authorities do anything for the offenders’ Well, they cannot because they are already snowed under with work – in terms of paperwork, and a weight of relatively more serious cases.
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Logjams
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On the ground, of course, retailers are already avoiding arresting shoplifters (for small-value thefts, for instance) because police are reluctant to take the case to court, and even when it does go to court magistrates are aware that to send people to prison will make crowded jails even more crowded. So whenever Mr Blunkett gets the headlines with another initiative – even one that given a fair head of steam will do good – one has to ask; how will it fare given the logjams in the criminal justice system’ The answer often is that those initiatives will come to grief. Let’s run quickly through the logjams. A low detection rate by police. That’s after businesses and individuals either don’t bother to report crime (for retailers, see above) or don’t have the crime they do report recorded by police. What crime does, eventually, reach court and a sentence – and an offender at that stage probably has done many more crimes than are before the court – those prisons are full and lawyers are if anything calling for fewer shorter sentences. Mr Blunkett too is advocating more ‘community’ sentences. However the feeling persists that a non-prison sentence is soft. The offenders are still around – in your shop, maybe, walking in your shopping mall. (So why arrest them for any other offence, if they are still around after the last time’!)
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Crime stats
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Why does all this matter to the private security industry’ Well, security managers are the ones who the retail arrest guidance is aimed at. And despite the gross under-reporting of crime, there is a lot of crime about. Let alone fraud, even more grossly under-reported, because of the logjams again – police lack time and expertise to prosecute unless a case is handed to them on a plate, and even if a case gets to criminal prosecution, courts see it as a lower-scale crime, and sentence accordingly (maybe into those overcrowded prisons).
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Best gloss
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Mr Blunkett in mid-July sought to put the best gloss on crime figures, claiming that overall crime levels remain stable. However the Home Office admits that robberies recorded by the police rose by 28 per cent last year. Robbery is concentrated in certain areas, with 82 per cent of all recorded robbery taking place in ten [urban] police force areas, according to the Government. Much crime is drug-addiction related. Mr Blunkett is showing initiative in the drug prevention field too, making cannabis possession for instance in effect less serious an offence. Again, any initiative comes up against logjams – the low detection rate by police, not least, and the sheer size of the drugs markets (and lack of knowledge on the part of the authorities about the market, and how therefore to tackle it, apart from the usual argument about whether to decriminalise or not – as if drug dealers would at once give up their clandestine trade routes and profits as a result).
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The security industry is pressing into use ever more sophisticated technology, but results still depend on the people pressing the buttons and moving the joysticks. Mark Rowe opens a series of articles on this theme of ‘the human factor’ by worrying for the future funding of local authority CCTV, given a UK media determined to see the worst in cameras.
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As Lord Falconer, poor soul, was defending the Government as best he could on the Today programme on June 28, it struck me how fragile are the foundations on which public space CCTV stand. Today – the agenda-setting BBC Radio 4 news programme – had linked the Home Office Minister for Criminal Justice’s visit to the latest NCP control room in Manchester on July 3 with a Nacro survey of research into CCTV, that claimed ‘very little substantive ‘quality’ evidence to suggest that CCTV works’. Lord Falconer fell back on the position that people say they feel safe thanks to cameras (an example of Labour ‘spin’, judging a policy not by whether it works but by how well it looks to voters’). The thrust of the earlier radio item on the subject, to the casual listener, cast doubt on CCTV as a crime-reducing tool. We heard snippets from the usual suspects such as Dr Jason Ditton, researcher into Glasgow CityWatch CCTV, who claimed that very few crimes were picked up by the cameras. Never mind that his report (covered in our October 1999 edition) called the Glasgow scheme ‘a qualified success’. Then came Prof Martin Gill of the Scarman Centre, University of Leicester, who by the way is stepping down as centre director to lead Perpetuity Research and Consultancy International, a joint venture between the university and Prof Gill. Given that the Scarman is in the middle of an all-important Home Office study into local authority CCTV systems, Prof Gill spoke commendably neutrally. Whatever that project concludes, one fears that the media will seize on any maybes – and academics will never say something is an unqualified success or failure – and write headlines such as ‘CCTV does little to cut crime’. Headlines in fact that this Nacro report prompted. Never mind that Nacro stated the obvious – CCTV is not a cure-all – and that cameras work better with publicity, and better street lighting and property marking.
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But a tool
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CCTV is but a tool, like a mobile phone or pair of binoculars. Like any tool, it has to be working properly to do its job – not only crime prevention, but health and safety and general management. How many times does one hear of a shocking crime and the cameras at the place were not working at all or had uselessly fuzzy tape recordings’ That’s not the fault of the equipment but of people. If a report into street lamps found that lighting did not statistically cut crime, would that make the news’ No. What is it about cameras that the media singles them out for media scepticism’ Simply that journalists with English degrees have their heads full of 1984 and Big Brother.
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Low standard of debate
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One shudders at the low standard of public debate, lumping together camera systems in car parks, public spaces, and ‘problem’ housing estates. Not only is a camera a tool like any other, the information that it gathers is no use unless someone acts on it, in good time. Note here, from the Today programme, the comment of an anonymous woman in the Broxtowe district of Nottingham that cameras have made no difference to joy-riders and other criminals – because the police do not arrive in time, and then the force helicopter comes over (another highly expensive piece of kit, for some reason never under the media microscope). If the Scarman Centre study does not give public space CCTV a clean bill of health, cameras could become a convenient scapegoat for Labour crime reduction failures, rather than (say) the laughably inefficient criminal justice system, or under-resourced police. If the Home Office pulled the plug on capital expenditure grants, where would the hundreds of local authority and police CCTV schemes find the money for upgrades’
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It’s worth it
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Research that sits on the fence and a ferocious media cannot damn the worth of CCTV. The Today programme either could not see or ignored the fact that NCP are investing in cameras monitored from central control rooms because it makes commercial sense to them. Would a journalist any more than the rest of us choose an unlit, unmonitored multi-storey to park in, or a well-lit, secured one’ Of course if they had any thought for their persons and their property they would prefer the car park with some security investment – of which only a part is cameras. While this sorry affair shows that the security industry can demonstrate any number of CCTV and related success stories (and indeed featured in Professional Security) and still come in for flak from an ignorant media, CCTV manufacturers should take note that security lighting, cheaper than cameras, may deliver reductions in crime and a lower fear of crime among the public. Again, lighting is merely another tool – and designing out crime consultants can tell you that too much lighting in a truly insecure area such as a subway, say, may send the wrong signal to pedestrians. One fears that the real message – that good security management calls for good tools maintained well and installed where they will do most good – will fly over the heads of politicians and the media alike.
