Frank speaking about local authority and police co-operation at a recent CCTV conference, featured in the January 2002 edition of Professional Security.
Police want to take but not give in ‘partnerships’ with council CCTV systems, Wycombe District Council CCTV Manager Mike Batchelor told the CCTV User Group conference. He said: ‘I don’t believe we have partnerships, I think we have working relationships, many of which are tenuous to say the least. Most police forces don’t view a local authority-run control room on a partnership basis at all. They look at it as a tool to be called on when they want it. It isn’t integrated into day to day policing and exchange of information. I would hazard a guess if we are getting 30 to 40 per cent effectiveness from town centre surveillance systems we are doing pretty well.’ How the Wycombe control room was refurbished with work-stations to end ‘data overload’ was another topic. Mike Batchelor explained how the Wycombe system grew from 25 fixed black and white cameras in 1996 with a co-ax connection one time lapse video recorder for each car park, one video printer to 162 cameras in 2001, covering eight sites, over a fibre optic network, a staff of 11, and a cost of £460,000 a year. The system has 21 VCRs for archive and three event. Some 16 inputs are digitally recorded. Wycombe is taking on the monitoring for two nearby councils, meaning at least another four sites. A far cry from the original 1996 system that was, Mike Batchelor admitted, ‘not much good, to be honest’. Such plain thinking extended to a rethink of the control room. He described a wall of monitors as ‘the most expensive wallpaper in the world … It was total data overload for an operator, an absolute waste of money in my opinion, but it was convention. It just seemed there was a better way of doing it.’ Alarms, telephone and radio communications are integrated in one PC-based system, so that an operator has only one control system to manage, and a good audit trail. On the PC screen, 3D graphics give the operator guidance on which camera is most appropriate to look at an incident. Use of ordinary office furniture has given operators more space for things like log-books – no more scrabbling around for scribble pads. Thanks to computerisation, operators have gone from writing four to six pages of log a day to less than one, which encourages operators to document things as they go along. An associated subject is crime pattern analysis, which depends on police crime reports and weekly summaries, that provide the control room with hot-spots to look at. For intelligence to be used, there needs to be a two-way partnership with police. Here Mike Batchelor took what he called a crack at partnerships.
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From the conference chair, Mike Withers, Salisbury CCTV Manager and a former career police officer, backed Mike Batchelor’s comments, saying Wiltshire police do not appreciate the local authority’s facilities. From the floor, Ray Stead of Portsmouth City Council asked why Wycombe had opted for control room work-stations and flat surfaces. Mike Batchelor repeated the reason of data overload, and that he could not find monitors that would fit the holes in the new work-station desks. The refurbishment gave Wycombe the chance to carry out some electrical work. He admitted: ‘It wasn’t a smooth implementation. We were down for four days, we limped back into life over the two weeks following. It took two and a half months to really get the system sorted out. It was fairly major surgery. We did anticipate some problems. What I didn’t anticipate was the grey area between supplies of new kit and existing contractors and the willingness of contractors to work closely enough with new suppliers to enable the integration to happen painlessly – of course that’s life.’ Wycombe have a hybrid system; most cameras are still recorded on analogue tape, while 16 have been digitally recorded for a couple of years. Thanks to digital, an operator can review an incident much faster, freeze a frame and give a much better description of a suspect. Digital recording has saved on operator time, too: previously, tapes were changed at the start and end of an eight-hour shift. Given a 162-camera system, tape change and quality-checks would take four minutes a shift. Wycombe has not reached the point where it can justify getting rid of all analogue, he said. He had some harsh words for the digital CCTV industry: ‘I don’t believe the industry has done anybody any favours with all the hype, mythology and out and out half-truths spoken about digital recording over the past couple of years. If you have got a requirement as an operational manager that can be justified by using digital technology, go for it.’
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In an exhilarating speech Bob Lack, of the London Borough of Newham, brought the conference up to date with his CCTV system’s use of facial recognition and the latest innovation – use of back-screen projectors instead of control room monitors. He opened by asking: what is the object of CCTV’ To prevent crime, detect offenders and protect life and property – similar to the police’s objectives. In Newham, an east London borough of 250,000 people, the Home Office British Crime Survey found 28 per cent of people felt greatly affected by fear of crime (UK: eight per cent). He inherited a tiny, cluttered control room in 1996 that was expanded by 1999 (see picture). Bob Lack set out the case for digital analysis of CCTV surveillance. Operators have an attention span of 15 minutes if they are not moved around. How can an operator, he asked, scan more than 20 cameras, remember 12,500 number plates of stolen vehicles, recognise local street criminals, and have a reaction time of 0.3 seconds’ Hence Bob Lack made the manufacturers behind the Newham installation – Petards (for the Cobyt touch-screens), Visionics and Dectel (for facial recognition) and Synectics – work together to deliver what he wanted. Merely by announcing that facial recognition was being trialled, crime on East Ham High Street fell dramatically, Bob Lack reported. ‘Suddenly local criminals know it isn’t you or I behind the system, it’s a comptuer, and they [computers] are better than you and I.’ He mentioned academic research in Newham into movement analysis – whether criminals’ body moves can be analysed and pre-criminal moves identified. Bob Lack suggested possibilities: if a person looks in a car park at several cars of different colours and makes, it’s suspicious; likewise someone hanging around a post office or a bus queue. What next’ Bob Lack asked finally. He is trialling an alternative to the wall of control room monitors that need costly air-conditioning: a rear-screen projector, as used for a conference speaker’s slides, that runs off a light bulb and can display multiple cameras, or even a map with camera footage superimposed in the relevant areas.
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Professional Security caught up with Bob Lack after his speech, and had some points clarified.
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Q: Do you find you are passing so many incidents to the authorities that they haven’t the resources to handle them'<br>
A: No. Bob Lack repeated statistics from his speech that in August the FaceIt facial recognition software from Visionics scanned some 527,000 faces; only 90 were referred to the operators to take a closer look at.<br><br>
Q: You spoke of offenders coming into the control room to see the facial recognition work'<br>
A: On sentencing in court, magistrates can ask an offender to join an intensive surveillance programme. Part of the programme is that the offender agrees to facial scanning. The offender is brought into the control room and given a demonstration of facial recognition. ‘Yound offenders are computer literate. They understand it and change their ways. We think that’s actually getting the message across.'<br><br>
Q: So publicity is important – because you can have security measures and criminals may simply be ignorant of them'<br>
A: Bob Lack said: ‘Signage is important.’ He repeated an example from his speech about building protection. A borough building was losing computer equipment to theft; CCTV and signs stopped burglaries. Each camera has a number and two signs (using a CCTV User Group model); the public can ring a freephone number, quoting the camera number. There are few calls to the control room, but good ones.
