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Bring In Alarms

by msecadm4921

If local authorities and other public services have CCTV control rooms, why not bring in alarm monitoring too’ We listen to a pair of councils and a manufacturer.

Croydon CRAC
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Croydon has some 500 cameras (including about 100 pan and tilts), covering public spaces and multi-storey car parks, monitored from two control rooms. The south London local authority acts as first key-holder for council property, and has service level agreements with schools. The alarm monitoring station will pass details of an alarm activation to Croydon’s in-house monitoring controllers, who have a CRAC (Croydon Radio Against Crime) radio link with a team of mobile dog handlers. They will check the property. Norman Whaley, Systems Officer at Croydon, reports: ‘We are looking into how we can monitor schools with the CCTV system.’
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The London Borough of Redbridge is using EmergencyCall, an automated call-out and response system from critical event notification firm Criticall. The borough’s communications centre responds 24-hours to Lifeline users, and is an out of hours centre for other borough services. Staff select from the computer screen the incident type, location and groups to be called, and press a button to initiate the call-out. The software verifies that someone can attend and their estimated time of arrival, says Manager of Emergency Planning and Monitoring Services at Redbridge, Sue Wittmack. Marcus Vaigncourt-Strallen, Criticall Chief Executive, adds: ‘This leaves the agent free to concentrate on other pressing issues that arise in emergencies.’
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At North East Lincolnshire Council, Ray Edmonds is the Grimsby-based Security Services Manager, part of the council’s direct services organisation. It monitors some 41 buildings such as schools, libraries and municipal offices. Ray told Professional Security: ‘We have set ourselves up a fairly comprehensive security operation which covers, I would say, most aspects of security.’ North East Lincs is a unitary authority, covering Cleethorpes and Grimsby. In pre-merger days the Grimsby local authority set up a small security patrol service to combat car park crime. The creation of much larger North East Lincs, and requests for the security service to cover other council properties, led to a rethink. Previously, several alarm-response companies had contracts to guard council buildings; today, alarms go to the NE Lincs control room. That control has a radio link to mobile patrollers who also act as key-holders, working to a target response time of 15 minutes. They check the building’s doors and windows, reset the alarm if the activation proves to be false, and provide the ‘client’ the next day with a report of the incident. The council officer responsible for the building gets a regular list of call-outs and problems to do with the property. At night a dog accompanies a patrol, because, as Ray says, ‘it’s more of a deterrent than half a dozen blokes’. All patrollers and control room operators are uniformed council employees. The local authority could not match a local private supplier on price, Ray admits; therefore the case for the council’s operation is made on efficiency and response rate. The control room also takes out of hours calls to the authority, co-ordinating for example repair jobs by council plumbers and joiners, and monitors Grimsby and Cleethorpes’ town centre CCTV, plus some internal cameras covering public service points at council offices, with pictures transmitted by ISDN. Bringing under one roof the surveillance coverage of NE Lincs has also taken some work – Cleethorpes’ camera images are transmitted by microwave, Grimsby’s by BT cable. Ray has under him two supervisors, six full-time and two part-time controllers, and 13 patrollers who are trained dog handlers, given a refresher course each year. ‘The local police have been very receptive, because as a local authority we have a bond with the police that a private company wouldn’t have, because they are in competition, if you like,’ he reports. NE Lincs does not intend to offer these services beyond the council.
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Coventry City Council does monitor council and private properties alike at its two-year-old, purpose-built, £1.2m alarm receiving centre, where operators are council employees. Manager Bernard Jefferies says: ‘Although we are the city council, we operate as a business. Our goal is to cover our running costs with customer income. We have to multi-task to survive.’ That means not putting your eggs in the one basket – namely, monitoring intruder alarms, some 1,500 users of the Careline service, and the council’s 100-odd CCTV cameras other than those monitored by the City Centre Company, the public-private body that looks after the business centre of Coventry. The CCC and the alarm centre both come under the City Development Directorate.
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Brian Kelly, Managing Director of alarm receiving equipment manufacturer Bold Communications, argues there are cost and other reasons for local authorities – and hospitals and universities – to consider bringing alarm monitoring in-house. Councils that set up CCTV control rooms may find themselves struggling to find cash to run them, and often these councils are sending their alarms to commercial third-party alarm receiving centres (ARCs) – a task that the council CCTV room can carry out. A local authority may have to take time and effort in collating the details of several ARCs providing a service to various council departments, but the cost benefit of going in-house is there, Brian Kelly says. Service level is another gain when going in-house, he says: ‘If you have an alarm activation in Bristol and it’s being handled in another city, you aren’t going to get the same level of service as if it is handled locally within a scheme where you have CCTV cameras and in-depth local knowledge.’ Also once in-house, the council is using staffing and space already in plcae, and whereas CCTV equipment is bulky, alarm recording only requires an alarm receiver and a PC, Brian says.

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