After years of uncertainty, the national CCTV strategy published at the end of 2007 offers a new era for public space CCTV users – maybe. Mark Rowe reports.
A local authority CCTV manager tells the story of a very senior police officer standing in his control room and saying ‘I don’t need your CCTV, Mr X [not his real name].’ The ironic thing is that the officer’s career since has proved that the police, and that individual officer, do in fact need CCTV. More than a dozen years after public space CCTV came into vogue, first with the John Major Tory Government, then with Labour after 1997, only now with the publication of the Home Office-led CCTV strategy are the authorities actually backing up the hundreds of millions of central Government money spent on CCTV infrastructure with joined-up thinking and standards for its best use.
The strategy document did, in the civil service’s diplomatic language, hint that those not making use of CCTV are not so much the operators and councils, but investigating police. Besides the senior police officers described above, whose time on the beat dates from before mass CCTV, there are detectives with 25 or 30 years’ service whose attitude is that it’s not for them to collect CCTV evidence.
And yet it’s a matter of public record that after 7-7 and 21-7 CCTV was the first and crucial evidence for police. It’s not giving away a state secret to deduce that when, as in the car bomb plots of summer 2007, the suspected conspirators are the likes of doctors, who do not have criminal records, and are not on the radar of the criminal justice system, CCTV is an important tool, to identify and track suspects. However – and it is far from the only example in private security – for anyone to go into public detail about this use of CCTV is to risk alerting the bad guys.
So we are left with the CCTV of everyday life having to earn its corn. And a couple of hospital examples from the Professional Security files point to the practical obstacles to making the national CCTV strategy work. First, there was the hospital CCTV manager who got angry after this manager was quoted calling the old CCTV system worse than awful and almost unwatchable, and giving the case of the missing person who was from the CCTV footage, a person on two legs – not a sheep on four – but beyond that you could not tell from the images. And the old control room was cramped. The manager should have thought before speaking, which is by the way. The point is that without a national strategy – agreed ways of putting a ergonomic, smooth-working control room together, and ways to get the best out of cameras, lenses and so on – each consultant, hospital trust, council, university and so on has had to re-invent the wheel. Public space cameras have been fitted in grotesque places that are impossible for an engineer to reach easily and safely; and the images they produce are not much use. Or as the national strategy put it: "The quality of images recorded by CCTV systems varies considerably. Anecdotal evidence suggests that over 80 per cent of the CCTV footage supplied to the police is far from ideal, especially if it is being used for primary identification or identities are unknown and identification is being sought, for instance, by media release." Yes, the Home Office Scientific Development Branch (HOSDB) issued guidance documents in the 1990s and introduced the Rotakin device to test the quality of the displayed image. But as the strategy added, it is widely accepted that the Rotakin test needs to be updated for use with digital CCTV systems: "There are also concerns that the documents in the series are not more widely used, especially by small CCTV users."
Like any tool, then, public space CCTV is only as good as its users , which brings us to the second story, of Professional Security being shown around a large hospital by the security manager, who worked for an outsourced facilities management company. The CCTV system of 120 or so cameras came with an uncramped and up to date control room, as demonstrated by a security officer. That officer, wearing an anti-stab vest, left the control room, at the same time as the security manager and Professional Security, to go on patrol. The control room door was locked, and that expensive piece of kit was left to itself. You could say – and indeed the first hospital manager quoted above did say so – that CCTV saves time and untold effort, by proving for example from a search of footage that someone or something has not been through the doors. Or in the case of a slippage or fall, CCTV footage may show that the workplace is not liable, saving on damage claims. But as more than a reactive tool, as a way of alert operators spotting crime before it happens, and deterring criminals who get caught and learn a lesson – you only get out of CCTV what you put into it. Like much else in life.
Where do we go from here? That was the title of a talk by Ian Cunningham, strategy project manager at the Home Office, and one of the strategy’s authors, to the November 2007 meeting of the Public CCTV Managers Association (PCMA). In the six weeks or so since the strategy was published on October 19, it was downloaded 15,000 times, ‘so it’s certainly out there,’ Mr Cunningham said. The November 2007 launch of the strategy’s programme board saw, he reported, everybody from across the CCTV world: the Association of Chief Police Officers, the British Security Industry Association, the Crown Prosecution, Department for Transport, Home Office, the HOSDB, the Office of the Information Commissioner, and from the PCMA, chairman Martin Lazell, the CCTV manager at the London borough of Kingston upon Thames. The list of attending organisations goes on: the Ministry of Justice, the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA), the SIA, which tellingly at first Ian Cunningham called the Security Industry Association before correcting himself to Security Industry Authority. The NPIA (www.npia.police.uk), Mr Cunningham went on, having the most resources and the most recommendations to deal with, ‘reluctantly’, he said, have taken on the role of co-ordinating, ‘and almost being a secretariat to the other partners, and to drive a number of recommendations that affect the policing side’.
Given so many government and other bodies, including some not famous for taking an interest in CCTV, the CCTV strategy will take some co-ordinating. The table talk, for what it is worth: the experienced shire council CCTV manager sitting next to Professional Security gave his opinion of the strategy as ‘mixed’. Talk among CCTV managers and the elected councillors responsible for CCTV as part of community safety is of how to make ends meet. Central government funding for capital spending on CCTV – not for its day to day upkeep – ended in 2002. The Government does point to a (bewildering) number of pots of money that CCTV systems can bid for, but CCTV has to compete with other deserving ideas. As the strategy admits, ‘the funding issue is a serious threat to the future of CCTV’, and its authors do call for a dedicated government funding stream for CCTV. The strategy wonders if the police might contribute more. Or might a CCTV system fund itself, by monitoring alarms, bus lanes and traffic, or retail parks or other places for the private sector? But, as the strategy document worries aloud, might that detract from CCTV for law enforcement and crime prevention? These are among questions for the strategy’s proposed body ‘responsible for the governance and use of CCTV’. Which might get funds from a CCTV ‘registration scheme’?
Some perspective always comes in handy. Two visitors to the PCMA meeting were from Australia. Their city council brochures were uncannily like those produced by UK local government, only the accompanying photos suggested a sunnier climate. The phrases are similar if not the same – as part of a ‘safe city strategy’, CCTV was installed in 2001, interestingly called ‘safety cameras’ as the Australians want to distance themselves from the UK that they see as overwhelmed by CCTV. The visitors told Professional Security of how fear of terrorism is a driver for more cameras; and the visitors were particularly interested in vans with CCTV, for mobile surveillance. Perhaps the rest of the world can learn from the UK’s steps.
You can download the strategy at the official crime reduction website:
