Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
CCTV UK
From the Press Association;
The UK has about 1.85 million CCTV cameras and the average Briton is caught on camera 70 times a day, police figures have suggested.
The new estimates suggest there are less than half the number of cameras in the UK than previously thought.
Deputy Chief Constable Graeme Gerrard, the lead on CCTV for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said the latest numbers, based on a map of CCTV systems in Cheshire, were intended to "inject more rigorous figures into the debate" over Britain as a surveillance state.
The widely-used estimate of 4.2 million cameras in the UK was based on a 1.5km road in a busy shopping district and extrapolated out for the entire UK.
And the previous estimate that the "average Briton is caught on security cameras some 300 times a day" was based on a fictional tour of CCTV hot-spots.
Earlier this week, the Home Office unveiled plans for a code of conduct to better regulate the spread of CCTV amid fears there will be "unchecked proliferation" without it.
It also said features such as facial recognition and powerful zooms were "coming closer to being an established part of the CCTV landscape" and that cameras were now being used in taxis as "a natural part of industry growth".
While acknowledging unmanned spy drones were not currently widespread, it added that their use should be considered "within any overarching strategy".
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Deputy Chief Constable Graeme Gerrard's interview with CCTV Image,
From cctvimage.com (February issue - pdf)
C C T V I m a g e
Deputy Chief Constable of Cheshire, Graeme Gerrard tells CCTV Image how he believes that developments in CCTV need to be continuously reviewed, and that although the National Strategy is in place, technology must be monitored and updated.
| I n t e r v i e w NOVEMBER’S announcement by Home Office Minister for Policing, Vernon Coaker, that the Government plans to establish a new national body to oversee CCTV is a significant step towards meeting the first recommenda tion of the National Strategy. As yet there is no timetable for the new body but, speaking to the House of Lords select committee, Mr Coaker said that its scope would cover CCTV in both the public and private domains. This, so far, is all we know about the new body (it doesn’t have a name yet). Perhaps the most important question at the moment is who will be represented on it. Graeme Gerrard, deputy Chief Constable of Cheshire and ACPO’s CCTV lead points out that when the National Strategy was written it was recognised that the world wouldn’t stand still and that somebody – or some group – would be needed to continuously review developments in CCTV. "It was never going to be that we could write the strategy, implement it and walk away. It needs to be continu ally monitored, reviewed and updated." The question of who will be rep resented on the body is particularly pertinent to members of the CCTV User Group because, at the time of going to press, doubt remained over whether the Group would be invited to participate. Its participation has been questioned because, although its membership includes many of the most forward-looking local authority CCTV schemes (plus other CCTV users of course), it is a commercially run organisation rather than an association or public body. As such, says Mr Gerrard, care has to be taken not to give it unfair commercial benefits or preference, regardless of the contribution that it may have made to raising standards and encouraging professionalism in the sector. The decision, he says, will be made by the Home Office. "I would like to think that [the new body] would be representative of users and all the agencies that are making use of CCTV in the UK," he says. "It is always very difficult to get anything like this to be properly representative when there are so many people who would like to be included." Whatever the outcome of the current deliberations at the Home Office, he says, the User Group should have its input. "I would be surprised if they didn’t take up the CCTV User Group’s offer in terms of assisting us with that." Once it is decided how the new body should be made up, Mr Gerrard expects it to be influencing standards of CCTV across the board – vol untarily in the first instance, but potentially through legislation if that proves ineffective. So what progress has been made to date by the programme board which took on the task of pushing the National Strategy forward? The board were due to provide an update for the Home Office towards the end of 2008: while some issues are pro gressing well, it was always expected that others would not be ‘quick wins’. Some areas have proved more prob lematic than some expected "Elements of the Strategy were writ ten some time ago – 18 months prior to publication – and events may have over taken them," points out Mr Gerrard. "One interesting example is the Home Office’s attempts to reduce bureaucracy in the police service. They have made a commitment to reduce by 50 per cent the amount of data required, but that conflicts with the Strategy recommen dation that performance data should be provided for CCTV." This recommendation was intended to help answer the question: how effec tive is CCTV? Without such national data it is certainly more difficult for local authorities and others to make business cases for their required spend ing. Yet the drive is now to reduce bureaucracy. "We’re in discussion with the Home Office on how to do it – we still need it but we’re having to refine our thinking. The way we’d originally envisaged it, is that it was going to be one of the ‘quick wins’ but this will not be the case." Finance is a problem for every local authority, he agrees. "None of us is awash with money and we have to show value for money when budgets are tight. We need to work together to try to identify how effective CCTV is – to present good business cases and show that this is a good use of public money." He points out that the argument should perhaps not just include sta tistics, but look at the benefits that are harder to define. "You can’t quantify the benefit to society of having a murderer locked up. How do you quantify the benefits to London society the fact that four potential suicide bombers were caught as a result of CCTV evidence – you can’t put a price on that. "As a police officer you get called to an incident and all you’ve got is half a dozen people fighting in the street and nobody admitting who’s responsible. CCTV provides the evidence. It shows who is the aggres sor, who started it and who is just trying to defend themselves." The bottom line is, he says, that justice is done far more effectively when the evidence is good, a powerful argument in favour of CCTV and one which is recognised by most of the public. One of the main values of the strategy is to give people direction – and though this is something that is hard to measure it’s reasonable to expect that it is already doing so. "For example, if you are a local authority and are planning to update your equipment the standard is there to be used." But this must be tempered with realism and an acceptance that it willtake time to bring about improvements in areas such as image quality standards, evidence retention periods and the type of equipment that users (particularly smaller users) install. "There was always a recognition that some of the changes that we would like to see would take several years to come to fruition unless you were going to put forward £100m at one go. Having written stand ards, it doesn’t mean everyone will move to adopt them. We have to wait for people to replace their equipment." Other recommendations in the Strategy are much closer to being realised, most notably the introduction of police airwave radio to local authority control rooms. This is progressing well, and Mr Gerrard says he is confident that any outstanding problems can be resolved. "We can’t dictate that Airwave goes everywhere but we can persuade those places that haven’t got it of the operational benefits. I can seek to persuade my police colleagues of the benefits if there’s a blockage on the police side. I see no reason why we shouldn’t have 100 per cent coverage of airwave in local authority control rooms. There’s no logical reason why there shouldn’t be. "I accept that some local authority control rooms and police divi sions aren’t communicating as well as they should be, but our front line officers see the benefit every day of the week of speaking directly to CCTV controllers." Graeme Gerrard’s belief in the value of CCTV control room opera tions (and the ability of operators) goes back to the 1990s when he was working on his masters degree in applied criminology. "I spent a lot of time sitting in control rooms seeing the frustrations of the operations not being able to talk to the officers on the ground," he recalls. "I saw chases where we were always three steps behind." In some control rooms, he remembers, police quietly encouraged CCTV operators to use radio scanners to pick up on what was happen ing – not something that could be officially sanctioned. One of the big problems that Graeme Gerrard’s Cheshire constabu lary has been tackling is the lack of reliable data about the number and location of CCTV cameras, as we reported last summer. Without this information, says Mr Gerrard, investigating officers waste a lot of time chasing evidence which may, or may not exist. Anyone who has CCTV cameras, argues Mr Gerrard, is imposing on privacy – picking up personal data – so in return the public has a right to expect that the pictures will be fit for purpose. Looking to the future, once the Home Office’s new body is up and running he would not be surprised to see a system of voluntary regula tion introduced in an attempt to raise standards. While a register of cameras may be something that the Information Commissioner would have an interest in, it is certainly not something that he has the capacity to inspect or enforce. "I have argued with the CPS that because a camera is there – at a corner shop or in a private car park – in the event of a crime there is a requirement for police to investigate whether it has captured any evidence. Often it’s not straightforward though, for example in an unmanned car park, and a lot of effort is needed to recover and view evidence. If you do all that to find the images are unusable you’ve wasted public money." Trying to get a realistic estimate of the number of cameras operating in the UK, people often quote the 4.2m or 4.6m figure first proposed by the academic Clive Norris, who counted the number of cameras in Putney High Street and extrapolated it across the whole of the UK. Another important consideration is the comparison between urban and rural areas. Just as importantly – perhaps more importantly – is the information that the Cheshire teams are gathering about the CCTV systems they register: are they analogue or digital, how long is evidence kept for, how easy is it to retrieve images? These details could also be extrapolated, meanwhile they have a very practical value for the Cheshire force. As for the national picture, he believes there is "a significant role for somebody to keep a national register of CCTV and keep it updated" – and this may well be one of the areas that the Home Office’s new CCTV body will look at.
Footnote;
Graeme has asked the CCTV User Group to help the Strategy team identify the number of PSS town/city cameras, in England and Wales, together with statistics on the use of airwave and digital recording. We are pleased to assist with this, as our database of PSS CCTV Systems throughout the UK, developed over the past ten years, has been widely acknowledged as the most comprehensive available, looking at all local authorities and their systems grouped into the respective police force areas. However, to ensure the critical accuracy we have involved our members in updating their data and by the time this is complete, we hope to give a definitive answer to that regular question "How many public space cameras do LA’s have in our towns and cities?", so in the next issue, thanks to our members, we hope to be able to tell you!
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