Outside the window is part of Mark Babington’s job: Snow Hill railway station in Birmingham city centre. Trains come and go. He’s Safer Travel Partnership Manager for Centro, the West Midlands Integrated Transport Authority. “What we do is all about improving passenger experience,” is how he sums it up. Later, he says: “I have two targets – that’s all; and they are simple. One is to reduce crime, and the other is to make passengers feel safer. Everything I do falls within those two targets.”
Several years ago the authority used contract security guarding on buses – ‘it didn’t work,’ Mark recalls, but that was not the fault of guards – indeed Centro still uses contract security officers. The guarding didn’t have an impact, because of not knowing when and where guards would have most impact. Because you don’t have to be long in the Birmingham conurbation to see that there are a lot of buses; trains; and the Metro trams, and the lines and services are growing all the time. Centro is seeing around 400 million journeys a year.
As Mark’s title suggests, Centro’s work on protecting passengers has revolved around partners – West Midlands Police (WMP) and British Transport Police. Both are based in the same offices, just outside the city centre, as the new CCTV control room. As Mark says: “When I started in 2008, one thing I was really keen to do was make sure that the all resources were deployed following the National Intelligence Model, ensuring everything we did was based on the intelligence and the data that we had. So we prioritised a dedicated police analyst as part of the team.” Centro then used data of where crimes were occurring, by season of the year, day of the week, time of the day; hot-spot locations; as well as any patterns, ‘which meant that actually what we could do was deploy the police to the right place at the right time; and that has resulted in a reduction of 65 percent in crime on the bus network over five years. That’s 5000 fewer offences in effect, which is a saving of around £23m to the economy.’ In other words, using the crime data also lets you show the economic benefits of cutting crime. WMP only cover the buses; BTP are the police force for trains and trams. Hence a Centro agreement with both forces and the work to bring BTP and WMP together.
Separately, Mark speaks of having revolutionised operations by re-locating the control room (the Safer Travel Command Centre). It moved from nearby Lancaster Circus, at a cost of £1.25m, which however has generated revenue savings of £0.5m a year; ‘and it’s the first and only time in the country that you have a Home Office force and the British Transport Police working together on a day to day basis, under one roof’. And, Mark adds, working more efficiently: “What it has done is make sure that our CCTV is right next to our police teams. So it means that the police teams can use the CCTV more effectively on a day to day basis.”
A next move is to use the Synergy management product from Synectics as well as IP display cubes so that any camera image can be viewed on any CCTV monitor. The reason; the data analyst may find that between 2am and 4am at a particular bus station there are problems; use macros to put CCTV from that place on the video wall, and monitoring by operators will be more likely to have an impact. As for such partnership work, I thought aloud of how in the 2000s there was much talk of it, and the ‘policing family’; now, though, it’s really happening. Mark, who has a community safety partnership background, recalls partnerships began with the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, ‘but money was around’ and partners could pay lip service to partnerships, and simply sign partnership agreements. But without as much money around now, if you want results, you have to work with others. As Mark says; crime on Centro’s trains peaks at a different time to crime on the buses. So why should BTP patrol the trains when there are known to be fewer problems, at a time of day when there’s more call for patrolling on the West Midlands buses and vice versa? It is one team, made up of officers from the two forces.
Whether using security people or technology, then, Mark’s approach is to say ‘these are my problems – what can we do to resolve them?’ whereas, as he points out, manufacturers of security products tend to do the opposite, saying ‘these are the products’, as if it’s for the user to find a problem for them to resolve.
As Mark says, he had to make a business case for spending £1.25m on the new control room, for operational and cost benefits, ‘otherwise it would never have got off the ground’. One thing that helped with this, Centro has re-located its IT servers, to the same room as CCTV, so that both can use the same UPS, generator and fire suppression back-up. Centro can now also offer commercial monitoring of CCTV and hosting of servers, and the like. The Command Centre is already doing some monitoring for train operators, for instance under contract with Chiltern Railways for Dorridge, Solihull and Birmingham Moor Street stations. Planned is an extension of the video wall to monitor the region’s traffic control cameras as a hub for West Midlands councils. Mark adds: “We are in the process of introducing the police Airwave radio to further speed up communication.”
All the evidence management, he adds, is now done remotely from Centro; for BTP, at their head office across the city. As Mark explains, that way the operators do what they are paid to do – monitor cameras, rather than provide footage for police, ‘when the police are the experts to do that’.
Centro is moving to IP – why, and how? First, Centro is changing its connectivity to digital circuits, ‘so we are swapping all of our circuits to RS 1000D circuits with BT’. One reason is cost: “There is an extra capital cost, but actually it provides a significant revenue saving to the point that the whole project gets paid for within three years. That then provides us with digital connections which then allow us to utilise those connections, or the spare bandwidth, to bring back additional CCTV from other sources.” He gave the example of Longbridge on the outskirts of Birmingham, the site for a park and ride station for commuters. RS 1000D lets Centro use the extra capacity to bring back CCTV from the station in the same circuit, and therefore ‘adds value’ to the project. And from a technical point of view, Mark goes on: ‘The industry is moving away from analogue cameras to IP, because it [IP] is good enough now for public space systems, the latency is not so much of an issue any more. The networks can support it, the cameras are better and we need to be sure our infrastructure is fit for purpose. We need to be thinking not of what we are doing now or next year but going to do in five years, ten years; so digital circuits are very much the first step.” As an aside, latency is the delay in panning and tilting of a camera by an operator.
The change to IP will take ‘a few years, realistically’, Mark says, partly due to the cost, partly because the Command Centre has some 800 Centro cameras – 1000 when more bus station cameras come in. The first IP cameras used are from Axis Communications; Mark adds that being ONVIF-compliant the cameras can work with other manufacturers’ products.
Also used by Centro are re-deployable cameras, transmitted over 3G, and integrating with the Synergy management software. “From a police point of view, what we are really happy with is that they can access all the re-deployable systems using an iPad.” That offers the prospect of a police patrol in a car that can view up to 12 re-deployables at once, who see something on CCTV, and respond appropriately.
Mark makes the point that the public sector, around the country, has to deal with unprecedented cuts: “We are having to deal with that and what we are trying to do is rather than cut, we are trying to find efficiencies and I see that as two very different things. Efficiency is about doing things better but not necessarily just cutting service. It’s about making sure everything is as cost effective as possible and this is what this [the control room] is a really good demonstration of.” In a word, being savvy. And the Command Centre has had transport and CCTV sector visitors to see how it’s done, ever since it was officially opened in May 2012 by the then Transport Secretary and Conservative MP Justine Greening. Mark’s also already done work with Bob Jones, the Labour West Midlands police and crime commissioner, elected in November who is looking to work towards producing a jointly agreed plan of action to make transport safer.
Given Mark’s local government community safety background – although he recalls that like others he did not in those days consider transport – he has used such new criminal justice ideas as ‘community payback’, funded through the Proceeds of Crime Act. In the case of Centro, offenders work off their sentence on graffiti removal or picking litter. Mark gives the example of a footpath along the Metro, which runs along a former railway line. As with train lines, there’s forever undergrowth to cut back. The ‘payback’ offenders paint hand-rails, cut bushes, ‘everything to make that environment look a lot better, and also from a practical crime prevention point of view, it gets rid of all the blind spots where people can hide behind a hedge.” Readers may enjoy the irony that convicted criminals are making it harder for other criminals to rob passengers.
As for stations, Safer Travel (it’s a brand, in fact, a partnership between the transport authority, and police) has helped another train operator, London Midland, to have 30 more stations gain Secure Station accreditation. To be accredited, on the same lines as the Park Mark scheme for car park security, a station has to show security for travellers. “We have worked with Chiltern too who now have got some stations accredited. There’s a lot going on,” Mark smiles. He chairs the national safety and security group of PTEG (Passenger Transport Executive Group). Mark sums up: “From my point of view, we are trying our best to make sure the partnership remains a model of best practice; we want to make sure we have others coming to see how we do things, although we will happily ‘borrow’ ideas from others.”
About the control room
Mark praises the Command Centre operators, from MAN Commercial Protection, who have dealt with more than 1000 incidents in the first 12 months. He adds that the Birmingham-based contract security company has provided a flexible service, which counts for a lot when new monitoring is coming in and demands change often. Besides the weekday rush hours, the buses, trains and trams carry football supporters. Over Easter a big event was the match between rivals Wolves and Birmingham City. West Bromwich Albion arguably takes the most work, as their stadium, the Hawthorns, is next door to railway and Metro stops. The British Standard-accredited Command Centre is long – five video ‘walls’ of ten monitors in each, and six images on each monitor. “And that’s about the minimum size you want to go to,” says the consultant, Redvers Hocken, “otherwise it has no meaning to look at.” Each desk in front of each video wall has the usual spot monitors and keyboards. The monitors show bus stops, roundabouts, and car parks which have ‘emergency help points’, stainless steel columns yellow so they are obvious to people in distress. If an alert comes from a help point, on-screen mapping shows the camera and the help point and the operator can talk to the caller.
Natural light comes in from behind the video wall – for the sake of the operators’ body clocks – and floodlights are behind the flat screens too, ‘to give contrast to the screens at night’. “It’s most important to keep natural light coming in, when we can,” Redvers adds. He points out that each desk has their own light, as each operator will prefer different lighting. Likewise the operators set the air-conditioning. It feels noticeably warmer than the comms room, which (unusually) is water-cooled. At the new Wolverhampton bus station for example, the Command Centre can make announcements over the public address, or digital recorded messages can play automatically, for evacuation for example. A reason for the move from Lancaster Circus; the control room like many others had grown, and grown. Not only in camera numbers but various types of equipment, and, due to tendering, various contractors, cabling in their own way. The move gave a chance to re-cable everything, Redvers says, ‘and make everything neat and tidy’.
The rest room and review suite, like the comms room, are indeed tidy. The rest room has a fine view of the city – as far as Barr Beacon, Walsall – and one of the city’s many canals. The rest room has the usual round table to eat on, staff lockers, fridge and sink and water heater. All are spotless, and none of the left-overs you can easily find in some kitchens. Besides wearing their colour ID badges (and black Safer Travel Partnership-logoed polo tops), staff log in by a fingerprint reader. Mark explains the biometric; it replaced paperwork, and gives proof of who’s accessed what, when.
