The casino industry has to be seen to be totally above board in the way it treats members and guests. CCTV is vital to achieve that.
In a supermarket, David Mills points out, you know where you are. You have so many thousand items at the start of the trading day, and so many at the end, you take in X amount of money, and any discrepancy is loss – due to staff theft or shoplifting. It’s not like that in casinos, says David, Head of Security for the Gaming Division of Stanley Leisure, who run 33 of the UK’s 119 casinos. A casino will have a start figure and an end figure, but thanks to games of chance there’s no opportunity to stock-take in between. A low-tech cheat can steal other people’s chips – value £25, £100, £1,000 – from a table, which is no loss to the organisation, but certainly a security issue for the player. He says: ‘For instance a player that goes to a table with £1,000, one moment he could have £200 of that left, and five minutes later he could be holding £5,000.’ In casinos as in any other field, CCTV fulfils a number of roles – it helps with the smooth running of operations, protects the player’s interests as well as the casino, deters the thief and cheat, and provides evidence. Arguably the fundamental use of a CCTV recording is to establish what happens during a game. As David explains, a player may make lots of bets and can be confused about a particular bet. That can lead to a dispute between the player and the house: ‘So we have the ability to actually review a section of play and determine what actually happened.’ Time is of the essence during the resolution of a dispute, which might be holding up play at the table. The aim is to resolve it in minutes. A CCTV recording is the way of showing a player that the disputed spin of the wheel or the hand of cards happened in accordance with the strict regulations that UK casinos have to work to. David says that the CCTV run by the security department, as a independent operation within the casino, can say who is in the right in the dispute. CCTV is the way for casinos, in a long heavily-legislated industry, to prove due diligence. Thus any dispute or other incident can be documented and a report (audited internally and externally) sent to the directors of the company. If a dispute should go to Gamboard (the Gaming Board) the CCTV tapes are available. ‘We can actually prove that the games are run straight, that where we do have disputes they are properly documented and resolved.’ Inside Stanley’s Gaming Division, there are two relevant bodies: the compliance arm, that handles the procedural side of the business, and the security arm, which deals with the CCTV monitoring.
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Cameras are a tool to combat cheats. As David says: ‘To cheats, we can be considered an easy target; we are a cash-rich industry. Everybody who comes in is either playing with chips that have a value, that can be stolen, or with cash, that can be stolen.’ Indeed, cheats can try to fix the outcome of a game, by marking cards for instance. ‘There’s thousands of different ways of cheating in casinos,’ says David. ‘We have to make sure we can monitor that, identify any particular cheats, and most importantly identify who is committing them.’ Though all UK casinos have to run a membership programme – it’s part of the legislation – David reports a problem with people changing IDs, perhaps dozens of times. Or, cheats come into a casino as a member’s guest. Casino security managers meet to discuss such problems in common. David, who has worked in the casino industry since 1985, is in a position to point out that there have been always been cheats in casinos, and casinos have been around for a long time. Over the last 30 years, the technology has increased to detect cheats – ‘for instance, in London now, every casino has a dedicated camera to a game table, and has a microphone on that table. so we can pick up images and the spoken word; we can prove effectively what actually happened at a table at any given time.’ David reports that no UK casinos have gone over to digital CCTV recording, yet. Tapes work well when recording images and sound, and digital systems have yet to deliver. While David acknowledges that digital scores over analogue recording when it comes to storage, he makes another point, about the quick retrieval of images to sort out a dispute between the house and a player. In such a case, the CCTV operators are not necessarily looking for an incident (say) five minutes ago, but five spins of the wheel ago. However, David does not doubt that digital recording will come in casinos; it’s a matter of identifying the right systems.
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What of the future’ Use of biometrics’ David says: ‘It is possible. That’s certainly one of the things we have been looking at.’ Cheats can use ever higher-tech themselves, such as mini-cameras, or computers to predict the outcomes of games. CCTV can monitor the gaming floors for any signs of scams, such as communication between cheats. Talking of communication, UK casino operators have a policy of full disclosure when it comes to security. ‘So if we have a problem, we will disclose the problem to our competitors, so everybody as an industry unit can move the casino security process further forward.’ At meetings, the casino security heads bring in gaming experts from outside, or associated bodies such as the police and HM Customs. When exchanging information about players, the casinos make sure they are compliant with the Data Protection Act, just as the casinos are careful to run their CCTV systems in compliance with data protection principles.
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About the operation: Stanley Leisure has 33 casinos – 30 provincial and three in London, including the flagship Crockford’s. A provincial casino might have 20 to 25 cameras; a London one more like 40. Not all Stanley casinos have CCTV at the gaming tables; the firm hopes they will over the next 12 to 18 months. The Stanley casinos have control rooms in each place with CCTV. If and when digital recording comes in, given the opportunities that digital gives for transmission of images, the firm may look to some centralising of control rooms. Stanley has a racing division (betting shops) that has a separate security department.
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About the security manager: As Stanley Leisure Gaming Division Head of Security, David Mills deals not just with CCTV but security alarms, fire systems, and safes. He handles anything of a security, and profit and loss, nature, such as detection and investigation of cheats, and staff training. He is responsible for high-security gaming equipment – slot machines, cards, roulette wheels, cash chips, and gaming chips – and disclosure of security issues with other UK casino operators.
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The several required uses of CCTV at Grosvenor casinos – a part of the Rank empire – drive what equipment goes in, explains John Butler, Head of Security for Rank’s Gaming Division. Those uses are: ‘One, for the security of the buildings; secondly, for the security of the customers and staff, and thirdly to protect our assets – i.e. cash and so on; and fourthly, to ensure that gaming is conducted fairly and properly.’ As he goes on to say, that adds up to quite a challenge on the technical side. One type of camera is not suitable for all requirements. John Butler is in charge of everything with a security aspect at Rank’s 33 casinos (two in Belgium) and 124 Mecca Bingo halls (six in Spain). His job involves him in building design, investigating fraud and theft; setting up crime prevention programmes; and looking at the way cash is handled – something that is particularly exercising him. John is looking for security as effective as in a bank but without the bank-style screens, which would put barriers between the casino and the customer – which is not something that Rank want to do. Innovation is a word that John Butler uses quite often. He says of CCTV generally: ‘I think camera systems will be more flexible, and we will be able to do more with them, make them pay their way, so they will have more than one use.’ Take the gaming floor, for example: ‘Over the time we have been working with ID Technology we have come up with some quite innovative ideas. Every unit has what we call pit replay, so instead of a manager having to go into the CCTV room to look at incidents that have occurred elsewhere in the casino, he can actually call them up on to a screen that is in the middle of the gaming floor, and he can find any camera and access any video recorder. We have gone away from having cameras in the ceiling to having them on support brackets so that we can get a much better picture of what is actually happening on a gaming table.’ In the last couple of years, Rank Gaming Division has been looking at hard disk recording systems, and is on the point of installing one to see how it fares. That would help enormously, John says with a facial recognition system that the company is looking at, which would screen out unwanted people to deny them entry to casinos. How does the security management of casinos differ from bingo halls’ John replies that although there are more people coming through the doors, there is not so much cash being handled. ‘It’s difficult to steal if you are playing a game of bingo, whereas if you are playing at a table you can try and pull all sort of scams.’ An on-going issue for him is burglary of premises; protecting sites with CCTV, alarms and shutters is a cost and is time-consuming. John reports that AWP (amusement with prizes) machines, which look like slot machines, make bingo halls more attractive to burglars, particularly younger burglars.
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About the man
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John Butler has been with Rank eight years in May; previously he was a detective chief inspector at the Serious and Organised Crime branch at New Scotland Yard. He reports that for several years Rank has seen the merit in dealing with one organisation not just for CCTV, but safes, doors, locks, and swipe cards. ‘One player makes sense in trying to get some uniformity into the type of product we use, because having an establishment full of different products is a nightmare from a maintenance point of view. It’s important to have a supplier you can trust, and worked with and also a product you can trust and work with.’
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Like David Mills at Stanley, Mark Beadle of installer ID Technology Group contrasts casinos with retail applications. Whereas CCTV in retail is recorded on multiplexers, casinos are recording in real time with audio. Typically, each gaming table will have one VCR, a static colour camera and a microphone. If the tapes are changed every three hours, and a casino has dozens of VCRs, that’s a lot of tape-changing. The installer has been looking at a digital solution with manufacturer Intervid that can provide real-time recording, with audio. This was on display at the annual International Casino Exhibition at Earls Court in London in January. As the cost of hard drives falls and the storage capacity of hard drives rises, digital becomes more cost-effective. A digital CCTV system offers the prospect of networked CCTV whereby the managers can dial into the system, whether at the casino or remotely.
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ID Technology Group install and maintain CCTV for Grosvenor, the casino side of Rank (and Mecca Bingo, another arm of Rank), and install for Stanley. Typically, the installers use the Mitsubishi CCD400 camera for surveillance of a gaming table. This colour camera is used for its high definition and its small size, plus its lens built into the unit that means it can be painted to blend into the environment. Also used are VCL dome cameras, and for recording the VCL matrix. A member of staff at the pit desk in the centre of the gaming floor can control CCTV video from a keyboard so that the house does not have to refer a dispute to the CCTV control room. There is a separate monitor away from the gaming area for a customer to see video images that will resolve a dispute. Over the last three years, says Mark Beadle, National Account Manager for ID Technology, the installer has put in CCTV at eight new sites for Grosvenor. That has involved designing a system around each site, with bracketry to suit the architecture. The sites range from the Claremont Club in Berkeley Square in central London, to more high-tech, newer buildings in Blackpool and Birmingham. At the Claremont, the system had to be discreet enough to blend in with the ornate ceilings of the grade one listed building.
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ID Technology Group Chief Executive is Ray Higgs, a member of the Guild of Security Professionals. He finds that the casino and leisure industry security business is an exciting one to be in – it’s expanding, casinos are traditionally security prepared to invest in security technology, and the switched-on security staff are aware of what they need. Also, much of the installer’s work is in the retail sector; the company is a member of the British Retail Consortium.
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A digital solution from manufacturer Dallmeier that can provide real-time recording, with audio was on display at the annual International Casino Exhibition at Earls Court in London in January. The system uses the MPEG-2 compression format for recording real-time video plus audio information. MPEG-2 is a known standard, mainly used in the broadcast industry. Even the new standard for home movie entertainment, DVD, uses MPEG-2 to achieve a visible quality of the video streams far better than the quality of the old VHS or S-VHS recorders. Consequently the new Dallmeier MPEG-2 recorder can record the scenario at a gaming table at DVD quality, which makes it easy for the staff at the tables to resolve any dispute swiftly. No rewinding of tapes, no exchange of tapes, just by the click of a mouse the wanted footage can be found. Dallmeier plays already a big role in the largest casinos in Australia: Crown Casino in Melbourne, Star City in Sydney and Burswood Casino in Perth where a similar system has been installed already. Known as the PitCam System, it has operated in Star City Casino successfully for three years. Security managers and staff at the gaming floor report they are pleased with the system. Any dispute can be resolved quickly; gaming tables no longer have to be closed due to disputes.
