Interviews

Community Safety Glasgow

by Mark Rowe

Last year we visited the Glasgow city-wide CCTV control room, as part of our look at Project Servator work before the Commonwealth Games. We return to a snowier city to hear about CCTV and Community Safety Glasgow’s (CSG) work against tackling crime and antisocial behaviour.

High in the CSG building, the boardroom has a long wooden table. It looks and feels like the tables and chairs in the foyer below. Offenders help produce a range of products as part of ‘community pay-back’ and the furniture in Eastgate is evidence of this work. In Scotland many offenders are given Community Payback as an alternative to custody. CSG provide training for the right clients at one of its facilities. It’s a neat reminder of what CSG is here for, inside this spacious and new building.

Professional Security was shown around the combined public space CCTV and Traffic management control room last year during a day in the city to see the official Servator deployments before the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

Now we’re across the table – and it’s a good solid table – from Phil Walker, MD of Community Safety Glasgow, and Johann Watson, Head of Security and Business Development. Phil Walker (pictured last summer at the launch of the official Project Servator – see last August’s Professional Security magazine) recalls the company being formed in 2006. The company is jointly owned by Glasgow City Council and the Scottish Police Authority. “We’re an independent company limited by guarantee with charitable status and have two trading subsidiaries.” The Trading subsidiaries allow them to expand the delivery of security services beyond Glasgow City Council to include the private and voluntary sectors. Key services include CCTV, Security Services and Lone Worker Technology. This company structure allows CSG to re-invest profits back into the organizations charitable arm, helping to make Glasgow a safer, better, cleaner City.

They have four strategic priorities: Improving Community Safety, Reduce Offending Behaviour, Supporting victims of Gender-Based violence and Reducing Environmental Incivility.

Within that, then, CSG has a range of services, such as the CCTV control room. He stresses their Priority Planning approach ensures that services are effectively targeted at priority area. “Because of the way in which the company is set up we have access to the police crime management system, which allows us to develop and deliver a variety of products on problem people, problem places and people that are affected.”

CSGs security services responds to the needs of Glasgow City Council but also markets a range of security solutions/products to the public and private sector to generate income.

You may recall from the Public CCTV Managers Association Christmas dinner, featured in the January issue, that savvy council CCTV managers are looking across departments at, for instance, various CCTV systems in swimming baths and leisure centres; by bringing them into the central alarm receiving centre (ARC), the economies of scale save the council money, give a better service, and leave the control room better placed in terms of budget. Here is the same joined-up approach; only, as Phil Walker puts it, ‘we run the organisation in a very business fashion’. He suggests that Glasgow’s hybrid business model may be a model for the future. It’s certainly prompted interest, and visits, from many English councils.

As for how that blend works, Johann Watson who recently picked up the award for International Security Manager of the year at IFSEC speaks of having to be strategic on a city-wide level. Johann utilises state-of-the-art technology drawing on a broad range of security expertise offering an effective, competitive, blended security solution under a single management structure. She gives the example of a council department that was a 24-7 user of security guards.

Professional Security recalled the 1997 Crime and Disorder Act, which gave local government new powers (and duties) against crime and disorder. Governments of different political colours have come and gone since, and austerity has bit. Whereas in England and Wales councils set up crime and disorder partnerships – which, some in business grumble, can sometimes be mere talking shops – Glasgow has made CSG work. How then does Phil see the future – more of the same? “We will increasingly develop and expand our use of technology, to improve systems, improve services, and also I can see a future where social media would enhance engagement with citizens, where we may get real time citizen engagement about service delivery.

The CSG building on London Road – some of the floodlights of Celtic Park, the Parkhead home of Celtic Football Club, are in sight further up the road as you near the place if you come from the city – has some 520 staff, enough to support a coffee shop in the foyer. They do have a lot of ground to cover, geographically and in types of work: criminal anti-social behaviour orders; trafficked women; victims of domestic abuse; drug dealing, on-street begging, prostitution; ‘we work with thousands of offenders every year’. Hence CSG’s attention to detail, by council ward: monthly planning, profiling and activity and impact reports.

CSG is working with Strathclyde University on crime analytics; given that CSG has data on places, enough to draw up ‘hot-spot’ maps can CSG start to predict where crime will happen? As Phil Walker says, you can well predict that more reports of fires will come on Bonfire Night; or even that more anti-social behaviour by youths will be reported when schools are on holiday. Can CSG better problem-solve, based on the intelligence it gathers over time?

As during Project Servator featured in the August 2014 issue of Professional Security, when police included the CEOs in their counter-terrorism awareness work, you are as likely to see the CEOs walking the beat in their black uniforms as police. These ‘eyes of the city’ issue 20,000 fines a year, Phil reports, for example for littering. “These guys and women are highly trained, they wear body armour just like their police colleagues, and they are all equipped with body-cams and radios; and they are all linked to the operations centre. They work in pairs, and they get involved in all sort of different activities in a normal Glasgow day. They can be just helping citizens, helping the police maintain public order, providing public reassurance, issuing fixed penalty tickets, going to schools and talking about citizenship, and generally just reassuring visitors and the public of Glasgow that there are people there that can help.” And on that ‘eyes of the city’ theme, as Johann Watson adds, CSG has re-deployable cameras and mobile camera van deployed that are monitored from the CCTV Operations centre. She gave an example of their use: at a construction site, to protect security guards.

We can see now that after the passing of the 1997 Act, and councils bid for central Government money for CCTV kit, each council was left to get on with crime reduction.

While such things as governance and organisational structure sound boring, they are the basis for CSG’s work – drawing together everything from out of hours monitoring of car park intercoms to fire and intruder alarms, and investigation of night noise complaints – whose officers drive unmarked cars and dress casually. CSG is still suited to the age of crime partnerships, as beyond local government the 999 services are looking to work together, on common issues and literally, inside the same buildings.

As an aside, besides being the model of a modern local government building, the Eastgate home of CSG is impeccably secure while keeping an open face to the world. Thus visitors sign in and go through turnstiles to the airy foyer. Whoever you’re visiting comes to fetch you and takes you up in a lift. You want to try the old trick of breaching security by asking to go to the gents? That won’t work, as toilets (well-kept and including a shower) are outside the inner access-controlled area.

Such a new building is a sign of how well placed CSG is to do its work. While it’s not for Glasgow or CSG to tell other cities how to do their work, Professional Security could not help recalling the recent Police and Security gathering of London security managers at City Hall in December, featured in our January issue. Mayor of London Boris Johnson last year proposed a business crime centre, on a Scottish model. Should London have an equivalent of CSG? Could it get the boroughs and City of London and Met police forces to work?!

Visit http://saferglasgow.com/.

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