Police have been praised for being ‘focussed and professional in the face of clear provocation’ in Edinburgh city centre yesterday in protests before the G8 summit.
Scottish Executive Justice Minister Cathy Jamieson said: “We are clearly concerned that some areas of Edinburgh City centre have faced significant disruption. Ministers are monitoring the situation closely and I am keeping the First Minister updated on developments. It is sad and disappointing that a hard core of protesters are more interested in protest for protest’s sake – and not in joining the rest of the country in focussing on the real issues of poverty and climate change.
‘We hope that employees and other members of the public were able to make their way home safely from work – in spite of the irresponsible behaviour of a few hundred people. The actions and behaviour of those involved shows just how out of touch they are with the mood of the nation – a mood so clearly expressed during Saturday’s Make Poverty History march. I hope that ordinary, peaceful protesters will see these mindless hooligans for what they are – and stay well clear of them. The police have clearly planned for circumstances such as these so that any disruption could be minimised. Their overwhelming priorities were to maintain public safety and public order.”
Meanwhile, Dedicated Micros has delivered two RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) to Tayside Police to help support the Force’s security commitments for the G8 summit, from July 6 to 8 at the Gleneagles Hotel, Scotland.
The simple to install RAID units will be used in the Tayside Police’s custody suite at the Force’s District Headquarters in Perth for the duration of the summit, providing extra capacity for the secure storage of CCTV images of those being held, supplementing that offered by the hard disks on the Force’s existing BX2 digital recorders from DM.
Sarah Craig, Senior Media Relations Officer at Tayside Police said: “As the lead force for the policing of the G8 summit it is important that we have the right CCTV systems in place. We are delighted that DM has been able to provide the RAID units at such short notice to ensure that all the storage capacity we need is available to retain vital images.”
Tayside has opted for the six hard disk 1.2TB capacity version of the RAID unit (also available with eight hard disks) which can typically provide 100 days of recording time in 24-hour time-lapse mode.
When connected to the BX2 (and other compatible DM systems) the RAID unit and its hard disks are automatically detected by the DVR. Crucially, all DM RAID systems are pre-configured and tested at RAID Level 5 which automatically reserves a disk to store error-correcting information. In operation the redundancy built into the RAID system ensures that the video from a failed disk is ‘mirrored’ on one of the other disks in the system. Hot-swapping allows disks to be removed and replaced without interrupting the system or causing a loss of information. For non-stop maintenance, the power supply and fan can also be replaced without the need to switch the unit off.
Pauline Norstrom, Marketing Manager, Dedicated Micros, said: “We were delighted to be able to respond rapidly to Tayside Police’s request, the RAID units continue to be extremely popular with our professional customers, given their ability to offer additional storage capacity and the ‘peace of mind’ that, in the unlikely event of disk failure, vital video evidence will not be lost.”
