CV One, the managers of Coventry city centre, were yet to switch on their new control room when we last visited, near three years ago. Mark Rowe made a return visit.
The CV One wall of monitors may not be to the taste of those who prefer a control room with just a few screens. I tried to count them – a block of seven by three, then a larger monitor with two smaller ones above; another bank of five by three; another larger screen with two above; and another bank of seven by three … there’s 64, Trevor Pepper helpfully told me. He went for the large number deliberately. Trevor, the operations manager (crime reduction), did not want the place to look small and dingy. It’s certainly larger and smarter than the previous, nearby control room. “It’s a clean room; there are lots of screens; lots of activity; it’s as much a selling tool as it’s a monitoring tool.” A dozen of the screens are showing the city’s bus station. Trevor describes how the bus station used to have its own CCTV system, which became outdated, and under-used, although coverage was good. “It wasn’t used to its best effectiveness; I have done a lot of work with the crime reduction team at Centro [the public transport body for the West Midlands] and it was a gamble for them to give their CCTV to somebody else; and we have helped to reduce crime and disorder on their bus station.” Similarly with a sports centre, that had a problem with walk-in crime; CV One took on the monitoring, and with other measures, such as access control gates, the sports centre has tackled the crime.
Bus station
Trevor and I put our coats on and walked through the city – past the historic, war-blitzed cathedral – to the bus station. Centro, Trevor pointed out, did feel that their problem was of a perception of crime, as much as actual crime, after 3pm for example when schoolchildren are going home by buses, maybe making a noise. Trevor praised the Centro CCTV consultant Redvers Hocken, and was not just saying that because Redvers is a member of the Professional Security advisory board: ‘we’ve all got our views on consultants’, as Trevor put it. The station inside was busy, tidy, and covered by Bosch domes, and a grey Metal Mickey (also made now by Bosch) outside. Also installed were Complus Teletronic (now Commend) help points, that transmit over Internet Protocol. Trevor reported the control room did not have a problem with people abusing the help point, whether pressing it for a lark or to ask for bus times. The control room operators – they’re contract staff, from Reliance Security – in that case do not give bus times, but answer that the button is for an emergency. Trevor and I crossed the road into Lady Herbert’s Garden, where Mark Mercer domes on heritage-style columns blend in, and nearby buildings such as a roofed shelter have discreet Bosch domes, to counter any anti-social behaviour, or roof lead theft, some of those cameras transmitting by radio.
Joining up
Joining everything up – the CV One staff, the CCTV, the retail and pub radios – is the ACIS software (Active Criminal Intelligence System) from the Birmingham Retail Criime Operation. ACIS, Trevor said, is used to plot offenders – ‘it gives your offender profile; what they steal, where they steal it from; their methods’; and if persistent offenders are excluded from stores, typically for one year, that too is managed. So that if a banned shoplifter is still reported stealing, CV One can go to a criminal court for a Crasbo or Asbo. Besides the log of what an offender does, the ACIS user can break down the data to tell a store what day or time of day they have the most reported crime incidents. Trevor gave a case of a smaller store thinking that its busiest day (for crime) was Saturday; Trevor was able to say in fact, it was Tuesday, when the store did not have a guard; so the shop could change accordingly. As in retail generally, CV One does not stand still. Briefly, it’s a not for profit company, directed by the city council to manage the city centre – to promote it, clean it, green it and secure it. Hence the control room manages public space CCTV, and pubwatch and retail radios – ‘a communications hub, if you like’. There are some 495 radios, which Trevor confirmed was a large number. Most are funded through the BID (Business Improvement District). Briefly, various town and city centres in recent years have voted for a BID whereby every business inside the district has to pay a levy, to pay for what members want – whether street marshals, more flowers or cleaners, or marketing. That way, no-one can refuse to pay but enjoy the same gains as the payers. Besides ACIS the control room runs an active command and control system – ‘our computerized log,’ Trevor described it, ‘so everything that happens in the city centre and handled by us will have a log; and we are dealing with 29,000 incidents a year’.
What’s the best?
‘I don’t think you ever have the finished article,’ Trevor said, meaning that there’s always new technology, better ways of doing things. But how to afford them, for one thing? And for another, is the end user necessarily the technical person to know what’s the best video management software, for instance? As Trevor said, if the user does not understand a new product, with or without training, it’ll go to waste. “The old analogue [CCTV] system was excellent because you could move it, zoom it, focus it pretty rapidly, and your quality always remained the same. With digital, the system needs a little time to think, sometimes, so when the operators try to move quickly, the technology doesn’t move quite as fast as the operator; so you have pixellation when you try to move the camera.” Instead of a joystick, the operators use a computer mouse, while the analogue and digital, VIDOS and Synectics management systems, run side by side. Why? Because CV One are still converting some analogue cameras to digital. There’s a mix of analogue and IP cameras: “You have to get your network right; once you have worked out where your pinch-points are and have the right bandwidth, you are in business. Having our own network has helped immensely; we have been using a bit of radio [transmission] as well, testing out radio kit.” That network is CV One’s Citynet, a wide area network (WAN). I mentioned the article in February’s Professional Security, about Bristol City Council’s cabling; and linking CCTV with the University of Bristol. Similarly, CV One and the University of Coventry are talking so that they don’t each put up cameras covering the same street-scene; CV One, the university and the Coventry-based Whitefriars Housing Group can talk to each other by radio so that if say Whitefriars pick up a suspect on their cameras, and that person goes into the university campus, the uni can know to pick the suspect up on their cameras.
National Pubwatch
Trevor Pepper spoke next about National Pubwatch; another ‘hat’ he wears. Now for some years Government has wrung its hands over how to handle late-night town centre binge-drinking and trouble-making. Since the Licensing Act, we have 24-hour (in theory) pub and club opening. One Labour idea that has faded was the alcohol disorder zone; if such a zone had been declared, and signposted, licensees would have had to pay (extra) for cleaning and policing. Something that has begun are drinking ban orders, like an Asbo for drinking. They’re imposed by courts and separate from exclusion orders that a pubwatch can impose, if a drinker has offended at a member’s pub.
Group working
Trevor said that some councils will seek to make membership of a pubwatch as a condition of the pub licence; but ‘that’s now what pubwatch is about. Pubwatch is very much about pubs working as a group and not having it forced on them.” Trevor gave Chester as an example of a good pubwatch, run by licensee chairman and secretary, with meetings well attended, and input from (but not control by) council and police. I asked whether some licence conditions have been security-related, demanding that pubs have CCTV; or door staff. Trevor replied that if a pub is inclined not to comply, it would buy a DIY chain camera, some cable and a television set, and that’s their CCTV, though not fit for purpose. Rather, if pubs have CCTV, staff should understand how to operate it so that they can download evidence, ‘and most importantly the police can use it to play on a machine common to them. I spend a lot of time trying to decode video and discs that the police have seized from various places that have encryption on; the system has been put in by somebody and the operating manual has disappeared; or nobody had any training on it.” Which brings us to the National CCTV Strategy; Trevor was among those who attended a workshop about it, in London in the summer, although the strategy seems to be among the public sector work in the air or shelved altogether in spending cuts.
Evening ambassadors
While many councils have contract taxi marshals who help keep order on Friday and Saturday nights at taxi ranks, CV One has ‘evening ambassadors’. First aid trained, their evening starts with meeting and greeting, directing people to restaurants, bars or theatres; they do environmental, street lighting and subway checks, and speak with any homeless, perhaps to direct them to hostels; and as the night wears on, the ambassadors deal with low-level anti-social behaviour; help pick up the drunk on the floor, maybe helping them into a taxi; and in the last part of the night, being a ‘presence’ outside the nightclubs, hoping to deter disorder, ‘which has worked quite well, because most people respect they aren’t police officers, and they are on everybody’s side; they are everybody’s friend.” The ambassadors carry radios and wear headcams from time to time.
