Having interviewed Roy Slater, outgoing chairman of the Public CCTV Managers Association, in our january issue, it was only right to interview the incoming chairman, Martin Lazell. Mark Rowe caught the train from Waterloo to Kingston upon Thames.
Having interviewed Roy Slater, outgoing chairman of the Public CCTV Managers Association, in our january issue, it was only right to interview the incoming chairman, Martin Lazell. Mark Rowe caught the train from Waterloo to Kingston upon Thames.
The Home Office having poured hundreds of millions of pounds into public space CCTV hardware, it has alas been left to the goodwill of a few volunteers like Martin Lazell to roll up their sleeves on such basics as CCTV standards and performance indicators, the nuts and bolts if you like of running CCTV control rooms well, so that each user does not have to re-invent the wheel. Martin, CCTV manager at the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, is no stranger to the unpaid, thankless work and travelling to do with an industry sector body; now chairman, he was secretary of the PCMA. So why does he or anyone do it, besides the day job? Sitting in his office beside the Kingston control room, he replies that he actually finds it easy to do such things. He is also chair of the London CCTV Managers Group, separate from the PCMA, but basically a London version of the association. He says: “Because the people who do it, give up a little bit of time to support it, are doing it because they want to, and they are a tremendous bunch of guys. Because we are all trying to make a mark, if you like, in terms of improving and promoting what we do, trying to maintain standards and improve standards.” The association is working with Peter Fry’s CCTV User Group, for example on training. While the group and association have different (though overlapping) memberships, their aims are the same. Take performance indicators. Already the PCMA managers looking into the subject have found it difficult to arrive at absolutes to do with CCTV operations. Take arrests for instance. Let’s say an operator picks up a crime. Martin says: “But if the police don’t have the resources to respond – this is an extreme situation, if there were no officers to arrest anybody – then arrests would clearly not be significant in terms of how well the CCTV operation works.What I always try and remember is that we are just part of a series of processes, which starts with what is going on in the street and ultimately can end up with someone in court, being sentenced.So there’s the courts, there’s the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] system, and we are just part of that. We can provide valuable information to the process down the line, but whether it is ultimately used is beyond our control.” Martin added that he would welcome study of this topic. Answers, though, always depend on what question you ask. Traditionally the question has been: does CCTV ‘work’; does it reduce crime? To Martin, that is starting from the wrong place, asking the wrong question. What if, I suggest, a person arrested thanks to a CCTV control room disappears on bail? Martin agrees: “It’s frustrating for the operator if people are unable to send out a unit. I am not saying it happens, but obviously it must happen from time to time across the country. But it’s just a fact of life really, that’s unavoidable.” It depends on police and crime and disorder partnership priorities. What if you have a dedicated police team for your town centre which is taken away somewhere else – as did happen in Kingston, the team tackled burglary. Martin is not criticising that move, not denying it is a valid move. But the following year town centre crime, shoplifting, went up. How do you account for that in CCTV performance indicators?! In a word, performance indicators require perspective.
Accounting costs
And as for costs of CCTV; local authorities have different ways of accounting for things like overheads, which will affect a performance indicator – cost per camera, cost per incident. You can visit the association website www.pcma.org.uk for three years’ worth of ‘best value’ documentation.
Emergency calls
The Kingston control room takes out of hours emergency calls for the local authority. One weekend the control room took 900 calls because of a very loud rave in a field in the borough (Martin was on holiday at the time). Kingston is looking at making some control room alterations to incorporate the borough’s emergency planning control, believing having CCTV cameras, operators used to handling such calls, and emergency planning together is the way forward – a communications centre. Martin’s line manager is the emergency planning officer. The control room was the place the borough had the team to deal with the (non-existent, remember?) millennium bug on December 31, 1999. Working on the performance indicators prompts the question; what is the business of a CCTV control room? Martin thinks back to the beginning of the Kingston CCTV control room – he (like Roy Slater) has an engineering background. Martin was the project manager, who worked with Chris Harris, the former Metropolitan Police man who was head of security at the Palace of Westminster. The two men with their differing experiences learned from each other. A control room, then, collects information; and passes it on. The control room does not arrest anyone, it doesn’t repair taps. It gathers, filters, and passes on to the right person, information. To carry on this train of thought, whether the control room uses VHS tapes or is digital (Kingston still uses tapes), they are merely different ways of storing information, to use if and when wanted.
A specialised part
The PCMA, Martin says, wants to make friends; on the contract side; with the BSIA; and here Martin picks up from his desk the flier for the Perpetuity conference at Leicester, on March 15 on the future of policing, that he hopes to go to. There is an appreciation here that public space CCTV is a part, a small specialised part, of the security industry, rather than a public service, though the customers of local authority CCTV are the (very demanding) public. On that score, the Kingston control room has links with South West Trains CCTV (an image on screen when Professional Security visited was of Surbiton station); the local magistrates court; and car parks.
Silly situations
A recent development has been use of CCTV for bus lane enforcement and the central London congestion charge. Indeed, apart from CCTV for crime and disorder reduction, there has been this growth in CCTV for traffic purposes. As Martin points out, it has led to some silly situations – enforcement and town centre anti-crime cameras installed perhaps 40m apart. A waste of public money, and it looks ridiculous. Hence last year under the ALG (Association of London Government) umbrella, a group was set up for all public sector users of CCTV in London – such as Transport for London, and the police (Metropolitan, City of London and British Transport). Three borough CCTV managers on the group are Martin, Andy Wells of Hackney and Alan Gardner at Enfield. Martin reports it has been a positive group, discussing items of common interest such as data protection and various links between systems. Traffic CCTV system users and crime and disorder ones have different ways of using evidence, for example. The latter will give a tape of evidence about an incident for a court to view. The operator is not required to attend court. By comparison, a traffic camera operator is required to write what he sees on the screen – and that is support evidence for a tape. And for traffic offences two copies of taped evidence are required, a working copy and an original master sealed and stored. Yes, two tapes are required for a parking ticket case, and one for a murder.
SIA licences
As for Security Industry Authority licences for CCTV operators, Martin welcomes such regulation as recognising operators as a skill, requiring training separate from manned guarding, something that contract security companies have not always appreciated when tendering for a council control room, though things have improved, Martin adds. The contract CCTV operators at Kingston are from Broadland. From that point of view the arrival of the SIA as an authority to define a CCTV operator apart from a contract guard is welcome to the PCMA and CCTV User Group, who have worked with the SIA on the CCTV operator licensing.
A beginning
However what of small council control rooms staffed by volunteers? And non-public space CCTV users and commercial control rooms – operated by retailers, banks, shopping malls and so on? whose tasks are not the same as public sector CCTV control rooms? Well, for Martin, the SIA licensing process is a beginning. There are questions such as a professional body, to represent CCTV managers. And what of professional development, for it can be said that today’s operators (or some of them at least) are tomorrow’s supervisers and managers.
And funding
And then there is always funding. Kingston town centre late last year was the first place to vote for (and get a majority yes vote for) a BID – Business Improvement District. Briefly, businesses in a BID pay a tax to go on improvements to the district – cleaning patrols, say, or better lighting. There is a crime and disorder angle – freeloaders always have been a problem for business crime partnership managers. That is, if one store pays towards a crime manager organising exclusions of shoplifters, and a neighbouring store does not, if there is a fall in crime, both stores benefit, the public-spirited payer and the freeloader. In a BID, all have to pay. Martin reports that the BID extra income will go on new things rather than (as cynics might fear) propping up existing services. In a CCTV sense, that could mean adding help points to CCTV columns. And indeed CCTV like other Kingston borough departments has drawn up its baseline services, so that additional services may be paid for by the BID. Say the town centre has a particular disorder problem at night; maybe the BID could pay for an extra control room operator.
And golf
All this; and time for golf too. Martin has a golfing calendar on his office wall (February had a photo of Seve Ballasteros in a bunker) and he (Martin, not Seve) reports that he plays off 20; he plays golf well enough, he reports modestly, to enjoy it.
