One Metropolitan Police officer and two Met PCSOs are the first to gain a qualification in use of CCTV evidence. Pictured are PC Mahbub Iqbal and PCSOs Damien Bilton and Kevin Mohess, based at Charing Cross police station in central London. They were congratulated recently by Met Commander Simon Letchford, pictured third from right. As the Met’s lead on CCTV for the national chief police body National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), he presented awards at New Scotland Yard to London CCTV managers, as featured in the May print issue of Professional Security.
The qualification endorsed by exam awarding body Highfield (HABC) is a level three certificate in Producing Forensic Images for Evidential purposes. The three officers are attached to the Westminster borough VIIDO (Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office). Trainer Richard Beckley, pictured right, told Professional Security that the three volunteered in September 2014 to be the first to take the qualification, and have helped develop it. Each man was assigned an experienced VIIDO officer as an assessor. The trainees completed a log of work to show that they had the skills necessary to work on forensic images in a VIIDO. As further regulations are brought in by the forensic regulator it is essential that that those handling forensic images are competent and qualified. The three also had training on producing DVDs as court evidence; on uploading images to the Met’s FILM database of images of suspects; and a day at a ‘forensics video lab’ to learn the dos and don’ts of retrieving CCTV. Lastly they sat an exam. The course includes how to use proprietary software; how to highlight suspects on video; and to create the right form for circulating footage – and producing the video still, in the correct format.
About 100 VIIDO staff are now to sit the qualification by the end of the year; and incoming VIIDO staff will take it. The aim; to make CCTV evidence a forensic discipline, as much as fingerprints and DNA. As Richard Beckley told IFSEC 2015 in June, featured in the August issue of Professional Security, CCTV evidence now sits organisationally at the Met inside forensics.
Det Chief Insp Mick Neville of the Central Forensic Image Team at New Scotland Yard, pictured second from left, said the idea for the course dated from 2007: “It’s the first time the police have had a qualification for officers who gather CCTV and also takes away the notion that every single officer can; because they can’t. It’s a move away from the idea that every officer can gather CCTV.”
