Continued: a look at how the Metropolitan Police trialled closed circuit television in London over the 1960s, which shows police having to work out all the things taken for granted today in operating the technology.
In the National Archives file Mepo 2/9956, the first word from the Met’s engineers, rather than uniformed police who wanted the machinery to work, came in December 1965 on ‘application’ of CCTV. Because of the ‘weather-proof housing’, much like the ‘shoe box’ camera that can still be seen in local government CCTV systems of the 2020s, ‘the whole system becomes relatively large. If a reasonable field of view is required, this whole system needs to project over the edge of the roof and it is doubtful whether this could be effectively camouflaged’.
A February 1966 memo by engineers reckoned that ‘properly used, television can be of assistance where normal observation by officers is not possible ….. there is a place for television where secrecy is essential and cannot be achieved by other means’. Publicity in Hatton Garden, and a separate trial at Highgrove Baths in Ruislip against bicycle thieves, had been ‘deliberately avoided’. The engineer made a case for publicity; ‘in effect this would be a psychological attack upon the criminal but to be successful it [CCTV] must first be shown to be effective and to be effective strength [manpower for enforcement] must be employed at the outset’.
The Met noted that Liverpool police in their experiment moved cameras secretly from site to site; ‘but publicity was given to their use, if not to their actual location’. Liverpool had an ‘immediate and sustained’ reduction in crimes, and a higher detection rate. Police were alive to the possibility that the criminals might simply move away from the city centre, because ‘neighbouring [police] divisions benefitted’. However, as with all official experiments, besides the will to see a success, Liverpool city centre had had extra police deployed; and the Met too was proposing extra ‘Special Patrol Group’ officers, at each of its next two proposed uses of CCTV, in Chelsea and Croydon. The SPG would be in plain clothes and carry radios to speak to the officer at the monitor. And the trial would have ‘wide publicity’.
The Met at least understood that those extra variables might explain any success, not the CCTV alone; for example, police suggested publicising one or two other boroughs, such as Soho – then a notorious district for prostitution and pornography – as a ‘red herring’. Police also suspected that the longer the CCTV was in use somewhere, the results were less; ‘only experience will tell us whether it is television or the extra men on the ground that are the primary cause for any reduction in crime we may obtain. The Special Patrol Group wherever they operate invariably make some impression on figures particularly in the number of arrests but unless we can achieve some results with fewer men it will be hard to say that any success is attributable to television.’ The Met had yet to realise that the SPG, too, might have its own interests in showing it made a difference wherever it went; even if it did not.
On the technical side, the force was looking to use eight cameras, with their own Post Office (the GPO before the privatised British Telecom was in charge of telephone lines too) connections, limited to 1000 yards from the monitor in a police station. Chelsea and Croydon experiments would cost £9250; very roughly, you can add two noughts for a 21st century figure. By October 1965, police had permission from the owners of the buildings that cameras would be sited on. Over 1966 to 1967, police approached some Chelsea places about hosting a CCTV camera: Harrods; another landmark department store, Peter Jones; a Methodist church; the National Provincial Bank at Cromwell Place; Cheyne Walk Hospital; and Wiseman’s at 67a Kings Road.
Due to many technical difficulties, only in December 1966 could the Met write to the Home Office for the authority to buy the cameras and monitors. As a clue to how slow bureaucracy was, in March 1967 an assistant commissioner said he was ‘appalled’ that the Met receiver had not ordered the equipment, despite Home Office permission by letter. The receiver blamed ‘considerable staff difficulties’, ‘but the tenders are now in’, the deputy commissioner John Waldron – shortly to become commissioner – minuted.
The equipment was due for delivery in July 1967. However in October 1967 the Met’s public relations manager PH Fearnley was suggesting to Waldron that a letter go to newspaper editors, asking them not to give publicity to the ‘television experiment’ at Croydon (arrangements for Croydon to take cameras were ahead of Chelsea’s). Fearnley gave three reasons. Publicity would give the criminals notice; the engineers could iron out any ‘difficulties’; and no publicity would ‘give it a fair evaluation’. The PR man did warn that over the last two or three years some of the press had suggested the Met was lagging behind some provincial forces, in use of CCTV. But if only one editor ignored the letter, every other one would be annoyed. Fearnley also brought up justice in practice; if anyone was arrested as a result of the experiment, wouldn’t this have to be disclosed in court (and reported in the press)? Fearnley concluded: ‘there is a tremendous amount of goodwill for the Metropolitan Police in Fleet Street at the present time and I would not like to suggest anything which even remotely might give cause for adverse reaction against this goodwill.’
In reply, Waldron did ask for letters to go to editors, ‘asking them to give us a fortnight without publicity; at the end of that time we can give them all they want and shall welcome it’. This compromise was a sign of the dilemma that would only continue when publicising overt or any CCTV – the public learned that police were doing something against crime; only, that public included the criminals.
Giving a first fortnight of unpublicised use of CCTV did give police some chance to evaluate if any reduction of crime was due to the extra men, or the television. A letter duly went to eight national and evening newspapers and the Press Association, the BBC and ITN (then the only broadcasters), the local papers the Croydon Advertiser and South London press; Police Review magazine; and an early magazine for the infant private security industry, Security Gazette. Starting date in Croydon was set at December 17, 1967.
Pictured, courtesy of the National Archives, file Mepo 2/9956: an EMI photo from the trial use of CCTV in Trafalgar Square during the state visit of the king and queen of Thailand to Britain, July 1960.
Continued: click on this link for part four.
