An armed siege covered by a camera, a fire at the town hall knocking out the power – you could say it was a busy new year for Hackney CCTV. That gruelling incident and other work was recalled at the London borough’s official opening of its CCTV control centre in 2003; from our October 2003 magazine.
On Boxing Day 2002 police, who were already investigating a shooting, came under fire from a window on a Hackney street. Borough CCTV manager Andy Wells recalls that it prompted a massive police response. Police set up an inner and an outer cordon: “All the people within the inner cordon, happily sleeping off Boxing Day, had to be evacuated, through back gardens, through windows. Our emergency planning team had to house them, feed them, arrange emergency accommodation for them.” The day after, a fire at the town hall meant loss of electric, meaning the borough’s CCTV service lost its town centre cameras. Thanks to temporary power arrangements, within four hours the borough had those cameras back.
“And then started a gruelling 15-day siege, with the gunman taking occasional pot-shots at police,” Andy recalls. By coincidence, one of the borough’s public space CCTV cameras looked across the front of the siege building, “so everything the police did was on camera”. The control room saw it all, down to the gunman setting fire to his room, presumably trying to keep warm, and fire brigade hoses working from behind bullet-proof barricades. On the scene was CCTV and Emergency Planning Service Manager Beverley Griffiths or Emergency Planning Officer Helen Cope, who recalls: “It was a huge operation.” (See separate article.) The 24-hour nature of the incident meant that control room needed its sleeping quarters, showers, and a kitchen. The police took away eventually some 2,200 hours of video evidence to do with the siege and the month before it. That meant plenty of work for the DVMS 1600 (the 16-channel Digital Video Management System from Silent Witness). All the data was transferred onto hard drives, and cloned to make working copies. All in all the siege provided a test for the borough CCTV and emergency planning; a test they passed.
The midsummer launch of the CCTV and emergency planning monitoring suite at Stoke Newington Municipal Buildings drew representatives from the Metropolitan Police, fire, even the London Resilience Team of the Government Office for London. The suite controls Hackney’s CCTV, and will act as the borough’s command centre in any public safety, crime or other emergency. Of the control room Andy says: “We use it as an emergency tool for everything. We have had several large fires which were shown on cameras nearby, and they [the fire service] could use this evidence as to how the fire started.” As one ate the launch buffet it was difficult to credit that the installer had to remove 30 tonnes of obsolete records and thousands of dead pigeons, and wade through seven inches of water. The building had been more or less derelict since it served as a bomb shelter and civil defence bunker in World War Two.
Some 600km of fibre-optic cables were laid beneath 10km of north-east London road. The installer delivered the nine-month £2.1m project on budget and on schedule. More than £1m went on the refurbishment of the Stoke Newington building. ADT were the main contractor during renovation of the former municipal building, and installed CCTV, access control and intruder alarms inside and at perimeters. A police viewing room allows officers to analyse images and, if necessary, forward them to Stoke Newington police station. As for business continuity, in the event of a power failure, a generator housed in the Stoke Newington building will run the system. Installation of this 16.5 tonne generator was, the installer suggests, the trickiest part of the project. There also is a back-up water container. Calvin Avery, Systems Sales Manager at ADT’s City of London branch, said: "The generator was previously used at Hackney Town Hall, but it needed to be moved to Stoke Newington, which – although a relatively short distance – was far from easy due to its sheer size. The move had to take place on a Sunday to minimise disruption to the public and we had to hire a 90 tonne crane to perform the lifting work. It went without a hitch at Hackney, but Stoke Newington presented some additional challenges. We had to lift the generator over the five-storey building and place it into a courtyard in the centre. As you can imagine, this was extremely difficult and left no margin for error – particularly as there was only a quarter of an inch gap on either side as the generator was being lowered into position!”
The borough is using the Vigilant digital recording system. Andy Wells says: “We have been extremely pleased with their sysem. The ease of use, the recording quality and the frame rate has been superb, and that’s the reason we selected it. It’s really a most responsive system.” Hillingdon were an earlier London local authority to choose the system (featured in our September 2001 issue). The frame rate of 12.5 images a second “is what I call virutal real time,” says Andy, “you are hard pushed to tell the difference [between real time and 12.5 images a second].” Andy feels that the quality of evidence that can be presented as evidence for police and courts is markedly better than one or two frames a second on analogue tape. He says: “We feel the decision to go for 12.5 images a second has made a crucial difference because it conveys the violence in an offence better than static images once a second.” He plays examples of street crimes. First, a man on a leafy street hones in on an old lady one afternoon. In ‘virtual real time’ we see how the offender throws the victim around to steal her bag, and runs off; two car drivers see the crime and speed off beyond the camera coverage and stop the man (who claims he is innocent). The footage shows the offence in its rawness – and will help the criminal justice system to give more deserving sentences to violent criminals – better than stills can. Second, Andy shows a man who smashes a parked car’s back window one night. The offender opens the car door and in he gets; but police have been alerted and a patrol car is already on its way. “Excellent piece of police work, and co-operation between local authority and police. We have vectored their patrols onto it and as a result they have arrested him.” The man tried to walk away from the scene, but police were having none of it. As an aside, the man’s girlfriend turned up and took a swing at one of the officers: “It shows what a hard job they [the police] have,” Andy adds. Third, he shows footage from an estate camera of a dozen police officers in helmets and carrying shields breaking a door, to enter a ‘crack house’, after police and the CCTV control room gathered evidence of people going in and out of the place at all hours.
Whether it’s elderly people leaving the post office with their pension, or cash in transit calls on banks and supermarkets, CCTV is there to protect people on the street from crime. Crime – to be more exact, drug-related crime – and what the politicians are doing about it is big news in Hackney, as in neighbours parts of the capital. The crime and disorder partnership’s strategy for 2002-5 (you can download at www.hackney.gov.uk) reports a November 2001 audit: the number one safety and crime issue for residents was drugs. Yet CCTV has wider roles, aiding the local authority as it carries out its municipal responsibilities on the streets. Andy Wells says: “We operate with parking enforcement, market inspectors; obviously the police; we have had joint operations with environmental health officers, to investigate abuses of the food chain – people smuggling condemned food into the human food chain. A whole range of agencies.” Police work includes Operation Trident, the Metropolitan Police’s effort against drug-related shootings.
The borough has 71 colour cameras, a mix of domes, pan and tilts, and some fixed cameras at strategic spots. Areas being monitored include nine cameras surveying St John’s churchyard. Incidents include robberies, and occasional fights between passing children and vagrants, who sit in the churchyard by day. The yard is also used as an escape route for criminals. Since last year the control room has handed thousands of hours of CCTV evidence to the police and fire brigade. Between 60 and 90 arrests a month have been captured on camera. It’s noticeable that the control room has blank monitors and spaces for more monitors – and more desk space for more operators. That’s room for expansion – for hundreds of cameras covering housing estates, for example. Also, TfL [Transport for London] funded cameras, to cover bus lanes, are in the planning stages. Winsted supplied the monitor wall and the consoles; flat screens are planned for operators to enforce bus lanes, yet taking up less room than a desk.
What developments does Andy foresee? Automatic number plate recognition? “ANPR is something we have definitely contemplated,” he replies. A bid with police for the system failed earlier this year; but he anticipates gaining the funds for ANPR in the next financial year. The police would have to set up a unit to pursue and arrest those caught as a result of ANPR, but it is something local authority and police are working closely together on. As for facial recognition, Andy says: “I see a lot of noise about, a lot of heat, and no light at the moment. I am very loath to put my foot in the water and splash out on it because I would like to see some systems with a solid track record behind them. Facial recognition – we would be pleased to see it work, put it that way, when it has a track record.” What are being looked at are call points: “We are doing a feasibility study; we have identified a lot of palces where they are likely to be needed, and hopefully in the next six months we will get money to install about 16 call points throughout the borough.”
Andy has praise for the installer: “ADT’s City branch took a very hands-on approach as soon as they secured the tender for the project. A high-tech CAD approach was used, as were specialist human design skills, to ensure that every eventuality was covered when planning the system. It’s pleasing to see that the finished project also very accurately matches the original design drawings. We were pleased to see how responsive ADT were to our queries during the tender process and installation phase. The company has provided us with an excellent service, and the quality of the workmanship and equipment provided is high – as an engineer myself, I pay particular attention to these aspects.” The work has included what Andy calls “some judicious replacement of worn-out components” so that only two cameras on the books are not working – and those two were burned out in a fire, “and there’s nothing you could do to prevent that”.
The CCTV service has identified hot-spot areas of street crime to concentrate on – a main street in Dalston, for instance, already covered by several cameras. Reports suggested that much of the crime happened between 12.45pm and 5pm, so an extra operator is on duty at that time, devoted to that area, linked to uniformed and plain-clothes police officers on the ground, and retail security staff, by radio. The control room has an intranet, which offers guidance for staff on everything from call signs (who is Mike Sierra two zero?) to proper procedure. On incident logging, for example, intranet pages of true scenarios define what is an incident. Also outlined are PSDB guidlines on images – what should be a typical identification image, for example (that is, if you want to capture an image of a suspect, how much of the screen should his face and body fill?) This way, operators can be develop their skills in a planned way, knowing what they have and have not been trained in.
The control room operators are provided by Norwich-based contract CCTV and guarding firm Broadland Guarding Services, whose Managing Director Brian Geary was at the launch. (Broadland provide operators for neighbouring Camden, and have had recent housing association contract wins.) Brian was full of praise for Hackney, who not only talk partnership but practice it; and for other partners, such as the Metropolitan Police. Speaking generally, he did not see hours of CCTV operators as a problem – “it’s a profession now, no doubt about it” – but added that it is difficult to recruit in traditional guarding. If licences and a criminal record check lead to a percentage loss of guards, where will replacement officers come from – inside or outside the industry? Education of some customers is required, he suggested.
