The fifth and penultimate part of the story of the Met Police’s sustained trials of early – and by later standards, extremely primitive – closed circuit television in London in the 1960s, from a file at the National Archives at Kew, west London.
Already the technical problems that would plague public space CCTV for decades to come were becoming plain; chiefly, ‘the time involved in installation’. Engineers, while suggesting that signals go to ‘a central point’ (a control room, now taken for granted), the ‘Tariff V’ circuits were ‘very costly’. Transmission costs, too, were for ages a bugbear. But always engineers could offer some the prospect of a better product, in this case ‘the GPO will soon have available a special quad cable and low cost repeaters which will bring the price down to £450 per year for the first mile and £300 per year for the second mile. If there are two cameras at the same location both signals can be fed down the same cable and the cost per channel would then be effectively £275 per year for the first mile and £200 per year for the second mile.’ As for using CCTV at night, an ‘image intensifier tube’ was available, which replaced the ‘normal Vidicon tube’.
The experiments were also leading to better ideas, that have stood the test of time in surveillance. An October 1965 report by Supt JP White and Insp John Geddes on the Hatton Garden and Ruislip experiments concluded with the need for a joystick to control a camera’s pan and tilt; and a zoom lens of at least 1:10 magnification for a ‘close up’, such as of a car number plate. Each camera should have a monitor, they wrote, and the officer watching the monitors had to be in ‘constant communication with all other officers engaged in the operation’. They believed use of CCTV was only justified ‘if it produces a saving of manpower as against any other method of achieving the same result. Thus an installation with only one cameras can never be economic as against the employment of an officer with binoculars.’
A sign of how the press lapped up any hint of CCTV came when the West End Central police station officers began carrying personal radios. The press assumed, wrongly, that CCTV was in use in Soho; and crime in the area did decrease. ‘But there is some difference of opinion as to how much if any of this decrease was due to the publicity about use of television’.
In an era of rising crime, police were sensitive. The CCTV experiment in Liverpool’s main business area of one square mile led to criminals leaving it entirely. London’s equivalent area was so wide, ‘that information of the use of television within any part of it would probably only result in a movement of crime elsewhere’. The authorities, then, already understood the risk of displacement of crime if they added CCTV, or anything else novel, into a place – the victims of crime would simply be different. White and Geddes concluded that CCTV had ‘a definite potential’ as a method of crime detection, ‘and there will undoubtedly be occasions when no other method of keeping observation will be entirely satisfactory’.
One example appeared to be the swimming pool at Ruislip, where CCTV was trialled covering the car park in the summer of 1965. In August, an ACC memo’d the deputy commissioner that ‘we have a long way to go yet with closed circuit. It is either fixed and unobtrusive or movable and obvious and it has at present no advantage over a man with binoculars. Its sole asset is as a deterrent and no-one is going to persuade me that its presence at Highgrove Pool was unknown.’ CCTV had seemed to work there, after six arrests of bicycle thieves. ‘The big disadvantage,’ the memo went on, ‘is wastefulness of manpower and this is only likely to be overcome when a camera is mobile and the monitor is in the station watched over by someone doing another job (or several sets).’ Again, that was hinting at a future control room of one or a few operators looking at many cameras.
The pool camera was on the second floor, in a camouflaged, locked cabinet, with a hole in the door for the lens. On August 9 the local detective superintendent Ian Forbes claimed that a decrease in cycle theft predated the CCTV, because of loudspeaker announcements asking swimmers not to bring their cycles, unless absolutely necessary; or to leave them locked; besides crime warning notices at the entrance, and in the local press. That the baths had had no stolen cycles so far during the use of a camera he described as ‘quite amazing’, a rare outburst of praise for CCTV. In April and May 1965 alone, Ruislip had some 50 cycle thefts reported; most not recovered, ‘and this is having a serious detrimental effect on clear-up figures’; police significantly thinking of how they looked, rather than the loss to owners. Yet having those four officers at the pool was not practicable, because the four were ‘the entire available strength of the sub-division’. CCTV would have its uses in the future, local police concluded; but the experiment should cease because of the ‘heavy commitment of manpower’. This was quite the opposite of a saving of manpower, hoped-for all along, by adding machinery.
In October 1965 a deputy commander concluded of the Ruislip trial that ‘we have learned very little …. There must be a great improvement in this television equipment before it is of very much use to the police.’ Ordinary police work could have made some of the arrests, whereas the trial had a policeman at the monitor inside the baths, while other officers outside made a total of 12 arrests; including a man who indecently exposed himself from bushes to girls on the footpath. As an aside, this may suggest that such crime happened more often than reached the police, if embarrassed women felt unable to approach the police about it.
As another example of how the press – doing some of the police’s work for it – liked to report crime, the local weekly the Uxbridge Post of Augsut 25, 1965 hailed a ‘police purge on cycle thieves’. The court, or at least the newspaper’s report of a case, did not mention the camera. Another senior policeman added his view in September, that the CCTV was ‘costly, clumsy and difficult if not impossible to conceal’. He recalled the Hatton Garden cameras had to be installed via scaffolding; and part of a refreshment bar on the street had to be partitioned off, so a camera was not ‘molested’. That did imply that police were not thinking of making a virtue of overt CCTV, as a deterrent.
Photo courtesy of the National Archives; from the file Mepo 2/9956, the EMI publicity photographer neatly captures the experimental CCTV camera beneath Nelson’s Column, to illustrate EMI’s trial use (at their cost) for crowd policing purposes during a state visit by Thai royals in July 1960.
Concluded: click here for the sixth and final part of this story.
