Roy Slater is one of the most prominent local authority CCTV people around.
After five years as chairman of what is now the PCMA – the Public CCTV Managers Association – he is stepping down. But that is far from the end of his work for the association, and in CCTV in general. Mark Rowe ventures to Robin Hood Country to the Mansfield local authority CCTV control room.
By the sink and the kettle near the Mansfield District Council CCTV control room, there is a list telling how each operator has their tea and coffee – with or without milk and sugar. Now that is what you call attention to detail. Equally – when Roy Slater, now head of engineering services for the council, takes me into an interview room – Roy speaks not only of running an efficient service, but of satisfying the customers – the councillors and the public. Because one is no good without the other. Professional Security reported in 2003, at a Perpetuity conference on CCTV at Leicester, how Roy Slater spoke on the subject, ‘how do we manage public expectations of CCTV’. How indeed? At that gathering he raised the dilemma: if your CCTV control room acts on more incidents, is that good (because your operators are on the ball) or bad (the press reports a ‘crime wave’ and citizens think, ‘blimey, there’s more crime about, I’m shopping elsewhere’)? And it is still a dilemma. As in any walk of life, it’s tempting to let the crush of work push such philosophical questions – even though they will affect what you do and how it is perceived – to one side. It takes an effort to do your job, and do your bit for the wider industry, as a speaker, and event organiser. As chairman of what was TAG (Technical Advisory Group) and now the PCMA, Roy has been one of the few who have done the (often unglamorous) legwork to make the PCMA tick. At the association’s December meeting at Mansfield, Roy stepped down as chairman. The association’s secretary, Martin Lazell of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, took the chair. Chris Platt, at Kirklees, stayed vice-chairman; Mark Jones, at Melton Mowbray council in Leicestershire, became secretary. New to the management team is Martin Beaumont, from Cambridge City Council, an active member of the association and the CCTV User Group, and now liaison officer between the two. Mick Napier of British Transport Police remains PCMA treasurer; while Dave Dale, JSIC co-ordinator, is retiring from that post and from Luton Borough Council, to travel the world for a couple of years, no less. Stepping into his shoes will be Bev Batterham, at West Norfolk District Council, King’s Lynn.
Roy is still on the management team, and has taken the task of setting up an inaugural conference, at Mansfield, in May, to last a day and a half, including a dinner, and taking in the usual quarterly meeting. With a larger management team, the hope is, Roy says, that the association can add to its 70 or so members, and improve its work: “The thing you have to remember, we all do this for fun; and I am very thankful for the support I have had.” On that score, Roy praises the incoming Martin Lazell, in part as a link to a London gathering of CCTV managers. For one thing, what London CCTV has to deal with, the regions have to in three years’ time.
Once a glorified coffee morning, for like-minded managers to discuss problems they had in common, there’s still that aspect to the PCMA; a Yahoo group, for example. Yet members have also put the hours in on training issues and bench-marking (as reported in our August 2001 issue). Bench-marking means public space CCTV systems (or indeed private ones) can measure themselves – in terms of, for instance, cost per camera per hour. Because CCTV does not stand still. Roy’s job has changed dramatically since, nearly ten years ago, he got the job of bringing public space CCTV to the Nottinghamshire town. An engineer by background, he is now engineering services manager, in charge of the local authority’s engineers, and a former police officer, Cath Bannister, now CCTV manager, reports to him. The system has recently passed the 150-camera mark, making it a medium-sized system in public space terms, Roy adds, covering six town centres, and seven railway stations. Some 330 radio links come into the control room too. He adds: “We have diversified in that we have taken on board our first set of deployable cameras.” They are from MEL; and WCCTV. The MEL cameras are being trialled in a housing estate, designated a Neighbourhood Renewal area, to combat anti-social behaviour; if the wireless CCTV performs to expectations, other Neighbourhood Renewal areas could have the cameras too. With Liveability Fund money, the WCCTV camera, which works using mobile phone technology, will be used where it is difficult to use other transmission methods. Applications for such a camera include dealing with fly-tipping.
As for innovation in the control room, Roy says: “I think we have tried every rota system under the sun for staffing. We have actually done a piece of work where Cath [Bannister] has worked out the correlation to do with incidents and positive action and the number of members of the team in there. So we have plotted the peaks and troughs of workload. It’s surprising; it isn’t necessarily what you believe it to be. And what we have developed is a rota that matches in with the needs of the area that we monitor. We are trialling this over a 30-week period in order for the cycle to go through the 10-week cycle three times, so everybody within the team experiences it. We are looking for feedback to see if this is good news for the operators.” Good, that is, in terms of staff body clocks and control room efficiency.
Roy is aware of the saying ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’, but says that Mansfield CCTV has gone up from having a hand in an average of 3.5 arrests per day to 4.7 over the last year. As Roy says, either that means the control room is a little better at what it does; or has Mansfield significantly got more crime-ridden? Roy mentions the increase in mobile phone use, meaning more ‘incidents’ are reported. In the ‘old’, pre-mobile days, if two men swapped blows in the town late at night, they might go home and put it down to experience in the morning. Now, chances are several witnesses will ring from the spot. Roy says: “That’s a fact of life we have to take into consideration, whether crime in real terms is increasing or whether the reporting or crime is increasing.”
A thread running through what Roy says – and his control room’s work – is the appreciation that CCTV is not immune to being questioned about the cost of the service. Roy speaks of ‘best value’, which is required of local authorities under the Local Government Act 1999. That’s the way the wind is blowing for all council services. And then the party-political landscape changes: two years ago, Mansfield got an executive mayor. The council, once solid Labour, went independent-controlled. Many of the new, independent, councillors, were on a local government learning curve. CCTV, Roy repeats, is not immune. Mansfield’s CCTV income generates 30 per cent of what it spends. That is not enough. In 2004, Mansfield brought in engineers WS Atkins to carry out an assessment of the CCTV system, looking particularly at best value; and should the set-up go from analogue, VCR recording to digital? The findings: the quality of the analogue system could not be improved by changing to digital. Roy explains that Mansfield has a combination of purchased, and rental, equipment. Each spending decision taken over the last eight years since Mansfield CCTV switched on has been the right one, for the funding available. Now, the system is at a crossroads; it needs to consolidate, to improve technically and reduce costs. As Mansfield paid WS Atkins for its advice, Roy does not wish to share it. Suffice to say, he and Cath Bannister must pull together the various funding regimes, and over the next 15 months work out what is the best way to go to digital-recording. Using VCR tapes is expensive – there are 5,000 tapes in the system at any time; and it is a proud boast of Roy’s that they haven’t lost one yet. Going digital will mean a cost saving. Roy and Cath’s task is to ensure that isn’t at the price of quality.
Ask the politicians and public in Mansfield (and indeed elsewhere): do you want to pull the plug on the council’s CCTV? and the answer is no. The coverage is appreciated. “However we still must address the costs,” Roy repeats. Hence visits by school groups. Hence the brochure outlining the set-up – with a nod to installer Quadrant Video Systems, and manufacturer Synectics for their PRIV privacy software. You can fold it to view a panorama of the control room and its video wall of 81 colour monitors. This is a common topic among PCMA members, who share bright ideas: yes, the public likes its local CCTV, but at what cost? There is not a bottomless pit of funding. This is where the bench-marking comes in. If you do it, you can measure if you are becoming more efficient, or how you compare with other CCTV users; and if a similar-sized operation is more efficient than yours, what are they doing right that you are not? And how do CCTV operations or anyone measure intangible things like shoppers feeling more comfortable in town centres? Roy differentiates the bench-marking of good outputs – operators (Mansfield’s are council employees, incidentally) working with police to effect an arrest – with the outcome. If shoppers feel that Mansfield is a less safe place to shop, because of all the arrests, that is a bad outcome for the district. And no matter how free of crime your car parks are – and Roy can point to almost crime-free multi-stories – it is no use telling a crime victim that they are statistically insignficant.
Mansfield has a Nottinghamshire Police officer dedicated to the control room, who picks up those incidents where there is not a designated officer and goes through the relevant tape-recordings. “He’s a member of the team,” Roy says simply. The control room has a police radio; and the police are paying for the control room to have one of the replacement Airwaves radios. Another popular question among PCMA members is: what do police authorities pay towards CCTV, for saying it helps with arrests? The answer usually is: nothing financially. Although that police officer in the control room (and Peterborough has one, too) is a benefit in kind. Having said that, it is a requirement of councils under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 to act on crime and disorder. Which leads us to what Mansfield is doing.
Mansfield has discussed informally with the British Parking Association (BPA) the Park Mark scheme (formerly Secured Car Parks), which the BPA manages for ACPO. Roy reports that the new scheme takes a risk assessment, rather than a tick-box, approach. Mansfield council car parks already have much CCTV, but for general feel-good reasons. Alan Jones, Midlands man for the Park Mark scheme, explained to Mansfield the worth of help points, coupled with car park CCTV cameras. In the working day, car park staff will respond to help point queries; if the person pushing the help point button fears for their personal safety, the CCTV operator has a video and audio link and can bring in police.
Like other towns, Mansfield has a growing night-time economy. Stagecoach double-deckers – with Liveability Fund funding from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister – has on-board CCTV. The council advised the bus company on data protection, in what was a new field for the operator. The drivers have a radio link to their control room, to answer mainly operational questions; if there is crime or disorder, that Stagecoach control room has a dedicated line to Mansfield CCTV control. Roy Slater adds that these multi-agency joined-up efforts to tackle Friday and Saturday late-night disorder call for a cultural change by those on the town. Instead of leaving a club in the small hours, getting a pizza, and walking home with it in a group – disturbing residents on the route with litter, and noise – the authorities are asking people to go home by bus. CCTV and police play their parts in enforcing order in Mansfield town centre when up to 20,000 people can be there for a night out. Yet acting on crime and disorder is what people want: Roy points out that litter, noise, and dog fouling, and the like weigh heavily with communities. Hence Mansfield’s mayor has set up a new portfolio, of public protection, that CCTV comes under. Public space CCTV, then, does not lack for enforcement roles … but always there is the need to show value for money.
