In 1993 David Pattison landed what, for him, was a dream job: he became the Head of Security and Safety at St James? Park, home to Newcastle United. From our November 1999 print magazine.
David Pattison (54) has supported Newcastle since boyhood. He’s been a season ticket holder for the past 24 years. Now, he can roam the stadium at will as he supervises up to 315 match-day stewards and security officers (there are just four security officers on non-match days). Pattison’s brief is a wide ranging one. He and his security team have to keep crowd trouble at bay; have to ensure players are protected once on site; and have to make sure no bottlenecks build up that could lead to a ‘Hillsbrough’, the 1989 overcrowding incident which left ninety five people dead and 400 injured. This tragedy was investigated by Lord Justice Taylor in 1990 and his report (see panel) recommended that football grounds should become more strictly regulated, and much more closely monitored than before. ‘When we’re winning, there are very few crowd problems, everybody’s happy,’ says Pattison. ‘But when we’re losing there’s the potential for trouble and complaints rise: the pies are too hot, the beer’s flat, there aren’t enough toilets. It’s amazing what a difference a few goals can make.’ On the whole, modern football crowds are relatively placid because the top teams play to full-houses and at least seventy-five percent of the crowd will be season ticket holders. Trouble makers are expelled and their season tickets cancelled. This has a tremendous deterrent effect and is self-regulating.
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When Toon ban
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‘When we ban people we get their aunties and their grandmas ringing up telling us we’ve blighted their lives. The passion is amazing. People don’t want to lose their season tickets. They now know not to cause trouble because they may be recorded getting up to no good,’ says Pattison. After Newcastle failed to win the FA Cup against a rampant Manchester United earlier this year there were ugly disturbances in Newcastle city centre. Trees were uprooted (they were small ones), telephone boxes vandalised and various bits of street furniture defaced and abused. City centre CCTV cameras operated by Northumbrian police captured the worst trouble makers on tape and stills were passed to the media for public pillory and identification. None of the trouble makers were found to be season ticket holders. Pattison sees this as vindication of his ‘tough on trouble makers’ policy. One strike and they’re out, he says, even when they’re away from the ground. Five season ticket holders have been banned so far this year (one after just the first game) and their seats allocated to five of the 13,800 fans on the season ticket waiting list. Trouble makers can be effectively tamed by technology. Camera pre-sets enable operators to zoom in instantly to potential hot-spots and monitor whether an individual is living up to the complaints received the previous week. Newcastle United now have fifty four cameras throughout the ground and two operators to monitor them. Previously there was just one operator and thirty three cameras. One operator monitors the exterior of the ground and the other monitors everything inside the stadium. This division of duties was a specific recommendation of the Taylor Report.
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From installer
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The cameras were installed in time for the August kick-off by Southern and Redfern, of Hartlepool. Southern and Redfern is the electrical security division of the Stadium Group, one of Hartlepool’s biggest employers. They were contracted through Balfour Killpatrick to complete the work. Southern and Redfern is to install more cameras once the building work at St. James’ Park is completed. The new CCTV system is already proving its worth, believes Pattison. ‘In just my four years here the technology of CCTV cameras has improved dramatically and the kind of coverage we’ve got now is far, far superior to what we had before. Technology moves on so quickly.’ But Pattison doesn’t see CCTV as a panacea, it’s just one component of an interlinked safety and security strategy: ‘CCTV complements the safety and stewarding operation; it can never replace it. There’s no sound for a start. Without all the rest of the little cogs being in place, it would be a struggle to maintain order via just CCTV.’ Peter Judd, the area representative of Southern and Redfern, agrees: ‘We spend a lot of time consulting with customers to find out what they need their system to do. They also need to understand that cameras form just part of an overall security plan. It’s not Big Brother watching you, it’s Father looking after you. The security cameras aren’t being nosy; they are there to help protect people’s safety.’ Judd has the job of presetting the cameras on match day to those seats which may contain troublesome individuals. He arrives two hours before the game to be briefed on any potential flashpoints. Southern and Redfern’s contract with Newcastle United means Judds gets to see all of Newcastle’s home games, something that would make the 13,800 people on the season ticket waiting list green with envy. But it’s an honour lost on him: ‘I’m a rugby man,’ he admits.
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After disaster
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Before the death of 96 fans at Hillsbrough, crowd management and crowd control was synonymous with the prevention of football hooliganism. High-profile policing, strict segregation of supporters, perimeter fencing and penning had become the accepted way of minimising flare-ups of violence at major matches. However, as the Taylor Report pointed out, these heavy-handed tactics were largely responsible for the Hillsbrough tragedy, and different tactics would have to be employed in the future. The main recommendation was for stadia to phase out terracing. Fans could no longer stand to watch their favourite teams as stadia had to be converted to all seater affairs. There were seventy five other recommendations, including: restrictions on the capacities of self-contained pens; monitoring of crowd density by police and stewards, who would be specially trained for this job; the opening of perimeter fence gates;, an immediate review of the safety certificates held by all grounds; new provision for first aid and emergency services at all grounds; setting up an Advisory Football Design Council to advise on ground safety and construction and to commission research into this area; that no perimeter fencing should have spikes on the top or be more then 2.2 metres tall; introducing new laws to deal with a number of offences inside football grounds, such as racist chanting and taunting. The main emphasis since the Taylor Report has been for football clubs to manage their own affairs rather than leaving crowd control up to the police. Hooliganism hasn’t gone away, but it has been significantly reduced because of all-seater stadia, the introduction of CCTV and the implementation of stringent safety strategies. ‘We now manage crowds much more than before the Taylor report,’ says David Pattison, Newcastle United’s Head of Security and Safety, a former police superintendent. ‘More effective stewarding reduces the need for a large police presence. The police are there to prevent, or deal with, outbreaks of public disorder and the role of the steward – who can deal with minor outbreaks of disorder – is to keep the crowd in check. The modern steward has the kind of role the police use to have before the Taylor Report. Stewards are well trained and can eject trouble makers and help prevent foul or abusive language. It’s now up to clubs to make sure their crowds behave.’
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Steve Townsend of Conway Security Products considers the factors needed for a successful CCTV system in the unusual security environment of a football stadium. The location creates its own range of problems for the operation of the normal range of equipment and some solutions and case histories are offered.
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There are a number of factors that need to be taken into consideration when specifying a CCTV system for a stadium. As the people in the main arena are the focal point of the surveillance, the subject matter is very different from a normal commercial site where a gate or exit is the key focal point.But why the big difference between stadium security and normal installations’ Essentially, people move as individuals and groups and when they do you have to be able to move with them. An empty stadium is an easy place to demonstrate a CCTV system. Suppliers should use the best quality camera and lens available and move the camera around showing the audience the exits, the goal posts and a number of other fixed objects.
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On match-day
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However, come match-day with an individual making their way through a crowd, maybe walking, possibly running and you have a whole different scenario. It becomes necessary to zoom across the stadium, zoom in on an individual and get a decent image of their face for possible use as police evidence at a later date. Picture quality becomes a primary concern. Advances in camera and lens technologies over the years have given us the ability to achieve fantastic results in observation applications. A police officer once remarked that he ‘wanted to see the nasal hair of the crowd behind the goal from the half-way line camera’. Not an unrealistic criterion but a little difficult to write a European Standard for! The camera and lens combination is one of the most important areas of the observation set-up, if used with a control system that can cope with the performance. <br>
A common problem with very large focal length lenses, as anyone with a large zoom capacity camcorder will vouch for, is being able to keep the subject in picture while it is moving. Most CCTV control systems on the market give fine levels of control, but very few have the ability to control the camera from the first touch of the joystick without shooting off fifteen or twenty rows of seats and potentially losing the subject matter. <br>
The Helsingborg Olympia Stadium has a capacity of 17,000 and it was refurbished in 1995. The CCTV installation offers an interesting case-study. Initially a brief was given to a collection of companies in Sweden for the installation and maintenance of football stadia CCTV systems.
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CCTV market
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The three companies, Industri Video AB, Process TV AB and System TV AB, had a wealth of experience in the CCTV market and were fully aware of the problems that can occur in stadia and the need for accurate control of cameras which are used to view crowds. Chester Root had seen Conway products at an international security exhibition. He realized that they had all the elements of precise control necessary for sports venues, and arrangements were made for Conway to give a demonstration in an empty Swedish football stadium for further evaluation of the system. A realistic test came a few months later at a match between Helsingborg and V„ster†s. This proved a vastly more realistic and impressive exercise than anything which could be mounted under artificial conditions. The match gave engineers the chance to install the system and for the police and club officials to see how the system could work for them. Set-up proved problem-free. After a few minutes observation, local police proved so enthusiastic and competent at the controls that they commandeered the operating system. The were able to pan, zoom and tilt, immediately taking advantage of the intuitive nature of the Conway unit and used it for the rest of the match. The Conway Omega system immediately allowed police and stadium officials, who had no prior skills in manipulating the equipment to identify a number of known hooligans, who were ejected from the ground after radio contact with plain-clothes officers on the terraces. At one point the police operators even followed the ball around just to see how good the creep-speed could be. The success of the demonstration at the Helsingborg match led to the Omega system being used in the Risunda Stadium at Stockholm for the European Cup Winner’s Cup Final between Stuttgart and Chelsea. Set-up time again was a key factor as there were severe restraints on the amount of notice given to the local installation company. Again, the Omega system met and exceeded expectations and gave the Stockholm police force excellent opportunities to study what turned out to be two very well behaved and strictly segregated armies of travelling fans. In addition to the Conway’s Omega control keyboard, receiver and pan/tilt/zoom heads, the applications described here relied on Ikegami cameras, Fuji lenses and JVC super VHS recorders and monitors. No use was made of multiplexers since it was crucial to avoid degrading picture quality through digital intervention.
