Northampton, one of the first councils on the CCTV scene, continues as a trend-setter. Mark Rowe in our June 2001 print edition learned about the borough’s pilot of automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) and moves towards centralised monitoring.
Sod’s law says that when you visit an installation to see some new piece of kit, there’s no event to show it in action, or it doesn’t work at all. Not so in the Northampton Borough Council CCTV control room. A buzzer sounded and a message came on the ESSA TouchView screen that the automatic number plate recognition had been activated. Just as control room manager Gary Hill had said it would, within three seconds the number-plate was checked on the Police National Computer; meanwhile an image of the front of the vehicle was there on the TouchView touch-screen. Gary can use the joystick to follow the vehicle on another colour monitor in front of him – it makes sense to install an ANPR reader on a camera where coverage overlaps with other cameras, to allow for the car to be tracked. Gary can tell another operator where the car is heading, so the operator can carry on the surveillance. The police have set up a dedicated team of officers that can swing into action; both times I see the ANPR triggered, however, the police decide against taking action. ANPR has made a difference from the start; Andy Vaughan, General Manager, Town Centre Operations, explains that before ANPR the CCTV system accounted for 200 arrests a month – a quarter of Northampton police area arrests. ANPR is generating about 50 arrests a month. Andy says: ‘What’s nice about it – it’s generally serious crime, things like Customs and Excise contraband recovered.’ In one case, someone was spotted driving who was disqualified the previous day; he was arrested the day after. Andy adds: ‘There’s a great deal of excitement about this technology in the council and police, and it’s moving CCTV from having operators who sit and proactively monitor the system all day, every day, looking for things of suspicion, to making the system more intelligent. When there’s a hit on ANPR it’s making the system more intelligent and the operators more effective.’
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Of parks and parking
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Back in Andy Vaughan’s office, there’s a framed picture of Queen’s Park, Chesterfield, the beautiful former Derbyshire county cricket ground. A business management graduate, he started at Chesterfield as assistant car parks and CCTV manager, where his first involvement with cameras was the setting up of a small, 12-camera system. He moved to Northampton with the same title, though the system was far larger (today, some 260 cameras; the control room is built to handle 500). He has risen to General Manager, Town Centre Operations, which is one half of the borough’s facilities management division; he reports to head of facilities management Tim Turner. The other half of the division is civic buildings and markets. The division forms part of the directorate of business and housing services, one of four council directorates. Andy has four responsibilities: managing the Greyfriars bus station; 21 pay and display car parks; from July 2, on-street parking enforcement from the police (recruiting the attendants will take his staff over 100); and CCTV. Under him are two assistant general managers: John Blake (operational – that is, parking) aned Helen Howard (admin and CCTV). It’s worth detailing the management structure, because Andy Vaughan speaks of the need for a competent team, given that managers’ time in local government as anywhere else is precious. ‘I am certainly not a technical person, and I have had to laern about CCTV myself, but there’s a great deal of mystique about CCTV.’ He speaks of having taken Tavcom Training courses ‘and just asking questions’, attending IFSEC, and reading the journals. ‘There are very few, I believe, technical managers of CCTV – I certainly don’t know any.’ His CCTV operators are contracted from Norwich-based Broadland Guarding; Broadland provides operator training, to NVQ level two, and the bus station contract security guards, whose site supervisor reports to Gary Hill. Operators sign a code of practice and start with three months’ probation. Andy points out that a bad operator can drive a ‘horse and cart’ through all that spending on CCTV: ‘Absolutely not here. Any suggestion of anything not 100 per cent competent and professional, then people leave. And that’s wrapped up in a pretty tight contract of employment. It’s one of those jobs you can only learn while doing it – that’s why the probation period is important. There’s people who can hack it and people that can’t.’ Operators need to think on their feet and stay calm during an incident, however serious. On a pedestrianised shopping street in the town centre, a lamppost is buried under flowers where a man was recently stabbed to death. Some 20 yards away, the dome camera that recorded the event is mounted to a shop corner. As for the managers, Andy admits he does not have the time to keep up to date with products; hence he has tasked Gary Hill with exploring digital recording – seeing the demonstrations – and reporting back. Northampton is a member of the CCTV User Group and TAG – the local government Technical Advisory Group.
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Some history
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Northampton first had CCTV in 1989, in car parks; cameras in the town centre followed in 1992. Before the current control room, opened by Home Office Minister Lord Bassam on April 6, the control centre had expanded four times. Andy showed me the previous, much smaller room, due to become a briefing room for the parking attendants: the borough simply ran out of wall space for monitors. The present control room has a wall of 63 monitors covering Northampton, and more for Daventry, whose 30 cameras are to be monitored by Northampton from June. A similar partnership arrangement will see Wellingborough’s cameras monitored from Northampton. Andy explains the need for a county-wide strategy, with Northampton as a central monitoring ‘centre of excellence’. Daventry and Wellingborough are to get 24-hour monitoring and can buy into ANPR at an affordable price – were they on their own, they could not afford it, given that the Home Office has invested ล150,000 into the Northampton ANPR pilot. Similarly, several local authorities with one control room stand a better chance of affording, say, digital recording and facial recognition. Although the Blair government has proved as willing a funder of public space CCTV equipment as the Tories, whether local authorities can feel sure they have the cash to run CCTV into the medium term is another matter. The present Northampton control room has an estimated life expectancy of three years and a new build is mooted. Centralisation of command and communications, for cost and efficiency savings, is not limited to public space CCTV; Northants Fire and Rescue Service in May recommended a merger with Leicestershire towards a five-brigade East Midlands control centre.
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Police partnership
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The borough is very much working in partnership with the police, both day-to-day and in the determining of policies. Andy Vaughan says: ‘I can’t understate the excellent relationship we have with the police.’ As asides, after I pressed the BPT intercom and waited to enter the town centre operations offices, a police man and woman came out the door, wearing body armour; and the eight-page glossy borough council brochure ‘Northampton: The Heart of A Safer Community: CCTV’ opens with messages from the council leader and county chief constable. As for tape enhancement and review of the various towns’ tapes, the police have agreed in principle to Northampton borough carrying it out. That will require secure transporting of tapes for viewing (and requested stills) between towns. (Some 2,000 tapes are in Northampton’s tape management system at any time.) In the window-less CCTV editing suite, a plain-clothes police officer was using the Clearview Communications Unimux for replaying multiplexed tapes from different manufacturers’ equipment. He spoke of police officers in Australia and Canada envious of such CCTV evidence available to UK police (and a fact-finding municipal group from Milan has visited the Northampton CCTV control room).
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System development
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Just as control centres develop faster than the original system designers could have imagined, so do cameras. Northampton has a mix of fixed, pan and tilt and dome cameras; the older cameras are being replaced by domes, Vicon Surveyor 2000s, as finances permit (current installer is ADT). Andy goes through the reasons for domes: local wrong-doers would no longer see the camera is not pointing in their direction, encouraging them to carry out crimes; dome cameras are speedier in panning and tilting; and the Surveyor 2000’s remote shutter speed control allows use of ANPR. Andy goes through the areas covered by cameras, which include car parks; the town centre; main roads in and out of the centre; railway and bus station; district shopping centres; Sixfields Stadium, the council-owned home of Northampton Town FC, and nearby leisure outlets. It’s no secret; it’s laid out in the brochure ‘Northampton: The Heart of A Safer Community: CCTV’. The control room handles several radio links: car park attendants (50 users); retailers (100 users); pubs (20 users). The control room has space for seven operators: today, one is responsible for car parks; one for the town centre; a third supports the other two if an incident occurs and manages the outer areas (such as the train station); one operator will cover Daventry; and Gary Hill oversees. As for Sixfields on match days, the CCTV operators used to carry out surveillance from the stadium control room, that may host a dozen people; thanks to the new ESSA system, operators can monitor from the main control room too; the nearby car parks, for instance, are a potential target for vehicle thieves who know the drivers are watching the football. Gary reports the four-hour CCTV surveillance job in the stadium is different (health and safety) to the town centre (crime-fighting). Sixfields is one of the places where the council hopes to upgrade to domes, for a faster pan and tilt speed. Transmission from Sixfields, and most of the borough’s transmission, is by fibre-optic cable, with a little use of microwaves.
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The Northampton borough CCTV control room operators used to be like Liberace in the way their fingers had to dance over the keyboard (or a number of keyboards). Andy Vaughan recalls how the borough in discussions with ESSA asked for ‘a bespoke piece of software’. While ANPR may take the headlines in Northampton, it’s fair to point out that TouchView is a computer-based CCTV control system. The software uses touch-screen technology to provide navigation around installations using graphical site plans and control symbols (in Northampton’s case, examples of symbols include a football for the Sixfields stadium, and a highway for urban traffic control). Gary Hill shows how the event log gives him an audit of everything that has gone through the system, so that he can check against the daily log book where operators have to note what manual patrols they have done, and for how long. Other features include a database of functions that can remind operators to, for example, change recording tapes; and the diagnostic information feature allows the user to confirm that data is coming from remote matrices across the town. The system can be interfaced with existing control room hardware. Andy Vaughan adds: ‘ESSA have done a sterling job in realising what our unique requirements were and designing a system that matched them.’
