Police users of public space CCTV in a Yorkshire market town are hailing their new digital recording system’s ease and speed of use.
The phone never stopped ringing on the night that digitally-recorded CCTV stills of two suspects in the east Yorkshire town of Driffield were printed in the Hull Daily Mail. More than 50 readers called police – even the mother of one of the male suspects, confirming it was her son. Several people remarked on how clear the images were. Two men were arrested. Such incidents vindicate the switch to a OCTAR 2000 digital video recording system. Back in August 2000 a Driffield Town Council committee of councillors, business people, shopkeepers, magistrates and police, decided on the switch from tape recording. Following a firebomb incident at a local kebab shop where the offender was seen to put a lighted object through a window, the committee decided it was time to improve CCTV image quality. Although the arson attack was captured on tape the definition was hazy, making identification impossible. Despite nationwide coverage, the offender was not traced. As part of the committee, Inspector Dick Wood was responsible for overseeing the town centre CCTV system. He chose the OCTAR 2000 system from manufacturer Visimetrics. The advantages as he saw them were: a minimising of the time spent managing the system ‘ namely someone changing and cataloguing the video tapes; and the rapid accessing of recorded information, which in turn would help Driffield police get on with their jobs. Insp Wood says: "We used to record onto video tapes, making six tapes a day and keeping them for 31 days, so we had hundreds of tapes to manage. When an incident occurred we had to trawl back through these tapes, sometimes taking several hours to find the relevant video footage. By comparison, the OCTAR 2000 digital system is marvellous because it is so quick and easy to use. It replays recordings in two-minute slots, so you can very quickly go though hours of recordings and find the bit you want. In the past it was a nightmare having to review old video tapes. More often than not, you got sick of looking and gave it up as a bad job, because for some types of minor offences or incidents it wasn’t worth spending a lot of time on it."
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Driffield’s 16-camera CCTV system, installed by Visual Security Systems, has static and pan and tilt black and white cameras, all linked by fibre optic cable to the control room. Originally the images were divided up onto two nine-camera duplex multiplexers, the outputs displayed on two 17-inch monitors and recorded independently to two VCRs. VSS, who are responsible for the maintenance of the CCTV system at Driffield, carried out the upgrade last April. The installation of the OCTAR 2000 digital recording system was straightforward, taking two hours. It involved removing the old VCR system, multiplexers and monitors, and replacing them with the OCTAR 2000. Configuring the system to record as police required took a few clicks of a mouse. Ashwin Lal, Managing Director of VSS, says: ‘It was a seamless change-over and we noticed a difference immediately. From day one there have been clear improvements since installing the OCTAR system, predominantly by way of the quality of the recorded images, in that they are far superior to the quality of the images usually recorded onto video tape. Then there’s the reduction in time and effort required maintaining the system. The biggest problem that a lot of systems have today is that they demand ongoing maintenance – somebody changing the tapes regularly or somebody reviewing tapes and footage, which is costly. OCTAR takes these problems out of the equation. It’s stand-alone, it simply switches on and records on to hard drives, from where you can download the recorded video information on to CD and review it elsewhere on another PC or laptop at your convenience." Inspector Wood adds: "We are now recording digitally all the time. The OCTAR system has sufficient capacity to record for up to a month, however we are recording for just eight days at the moment and are looking to enhance the memory in the future. Also as it is tape-less it doesn’t require any intervention by an operator. We are now making huge time-savings, whereas to pay a person to look at the screen would cost so much it is just not worth it. In addition, our old video tapes needed to be replaced every year, which was costing us around £500 year on year. Now all we are spending is about 30p on a CD each time we need to make a copy from the hard drive. We see the digital system as being far cheaper compared to using video tapes. I imagine there are many small towns that would benefit from using a system like this."
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Driffield police use the digital recorder to select and view any required image sequences without affecting the ongoing recording process. Video recordings can be copied to CD for review on other computers, using the OCTAR Replay software, which automatically gets recorded to CD with the evidence. The individual images can even be emailed to other police forces. The system’s ‘scheduler’ feature is used to good effect by ensuring images are captured at a faster rate during busy periods, slowing down when things are quiet, saving on disk space and thus cost. <br>
Whilst the system is fairly new it has already been used successfully in incidents of criminal damage, public disorder, thefts and deceptions in Driffield. The cameras have also been useful for tracing witnesses. Inspector Wood says: " For example, in early August a report was received of a young mother being accosted in a local shop. Whilst the incident was not serious it was important the man involved was traced. We took the unusual step of publishing the man’s photograph in the local Driffield Times newspaper and immediately the person came forward. The accosting was a case of mistaken identity with no criminal motive. Resolving these kind of minor incidents contributes to a safer environment and hopefully reduces the fear of crime.’ Gary James of Visimetrics (UK) says: "Many end users are still labouring under the misapprehension that there is some difficulty in using digitally recorded evidence to support cases which come to court. However we have extensive experience of supporting both our customers and the police when recordings from our systems are produced as evidence. Ironically this even extends to producing video tape copies of footage required when the court is not equipped with a computer. In these cases the clarity of image has been of major importance, every bit as crucial as the speed of locating the evidence when a crime has first been detected. Our support in this field has involved many kinds of theft, some serious drugs cases and recently, a shooting outside a shopping centre which uses OCTAR 2000."
