In the City

The City of London Police Force is the smallest in the UK, covering a mere 1.2 square miles and just 26 linear miles of roadway. However, despite its diminutive scale, the City district of the Capital contributes a whopping 3% of the UK’s total Gross Domestic Product. Foreign exchange alone worth over $500 billion is transacted here each and every day. Although the area boasts ‘only’ 8,000 residents, no less than 365,000 commuters enter and leave the City each weekday.

Understandably, the City is a prime target for terrorist attack. However, responses to the need for security – as evidenced in SMT’s recent Case Study of 30 St Mary Axe (‘Reach for the Sky’, October 2004, pp18-26) – have shown that sophisticated CCTV networks can provide a number of clear protection benefits while contributing to a location’s well-being in a host of other areas… just as long as the equipment specified is up to the job.

Of late, changes in management and policing of the City have been driven largely by the Corporation of London and private business wanting a safer, more secure and somewhat more vibrant environment.

Following on from the two high profile terrorist attacks of the 1990s, of course, the Corporation restricted vehicular access to the City. This enabled the City of London Police to stop, check and search vehicles entering and leaving the City. The national press dubbed this particular defence mechanism ‘The Ring of Steel’, and it certainly made a huge difference in perceived security levels if comments from businesses are anything to go by.

When superintendent Andrew Mellor first joined the City force, CCTV consisted of a few traffic cameras. Some of the bigger corporations had specified fairly ineffectual stand-alone surveillance systems that were poorly maintained. Cameras invariably pointed in the wrong direction, too! Since then, the City of London Police has worked hard to educate members of the business community in surveillance techniques, looking at system specification, operation and maintenance as well as data management and storage.

Indeed, the City force has presided over the creation of a fully-automated CCTV network. Once seen as merely a step towards greater national security, it has helped to control crime and traffic and also bettered the environment. “Ten years ago the Square Mile would be as quiet as a graveyard after 8.00 pm,” said Andrew Mellor in an exclusive interview with SMT. “The pubs closed and City workers would just drift off home. Now, it’s truly a 24-hour City, with galleries, theatres, night clubs, bars, restaurants and railway stations all remaining open much later into the evening.”

Steve Smith – head of the City of London Police CCTV Command and Control Centre – cut his teeth with the Essex Constabulary, where he was given special responsibility to look after security at Stansted Airport. The experience Smith gained there has undoubtedly helped in his new role (which is to manage the whole of the police response in the City – by way of viewing incidents via CCTV, taking and directing calls).

Now managing over 70 staff, Smith said: “In the early days, most of the CCTV systems were manually operated. Finding a camera meant approaching a switchboard and camera images would then appear on a map. Today, operators just need to touch the screen to select the camera views they wish to see.”

Smith is quick to point out that the deployment of CCTV isn’t purely for reactive policing. Control Room operators are still well qualified in the practice of observing unusual behaviour and detecting criminal activity. Nor is it the case that the City of London Police use cameras as a substitute for a uniformed presence on the streets of the City. Part of the anti-terrorist strategy is for officers to be visible at street level at all times.

A powerful monitoring network

There are just shy of 200 cameras covering the City as part of the dedicated public space surveillance scheme (a number expected to swell beyond 240 come the end of this year). The network of surveillance allows for cameras to monitor exit and entry points to prevent terrorism, deter criminality and detect it whenever and wherever it does occur.

“At the moment, if a member of the general public or a company employee in the Square Mile were to make a 999 call it would be routed through an operator, who then connects to either the police, fire or ambulance service where another operator will ask pertinent questions and record the necessary details,” continued Steve Smith. “We can respond to a real time image immediately because there are people who are paid to sit and watch the monitors and react accordingly.”

Some cameras have special functions, such as monitoring sections of the River Thames for water-borne threats to safety and civic order (the Houses of Parliament are a mere one mile up river from the City, after all). In addition, dedicated traffic monitoring cameras have been upgraded and updated for shared use by organisations such as Transport for London in tracking suspect vehicles via Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR)-based CCTV schemes.

Exit and entry points are monitored in conjunction with other bodies such as the Metropolitan Police. ANPR ensures that vehicle entry monitoring is assisted at all times, alerting monitoring staff to any vehicles attempting to enter the Square Mile that are listed on the Police National Computer (PNC) or one of the City of London Police’s own lists. Previously, this kind of security monitoring would have involved manned entry and exit points, which would simply not have happened (in part due to lack of policing numbers). The manpower requirements alone would have been a major prohibitive factor.

Connection to the PNC in Berkshire means that each vehicle registration is scanned when passing through one of the designated City entry points. If – for whatever reason – the vehicle has a query attached to it, the data will be sent back to the Control Room within a matter of seconds. It’s not unusual for an alarm to be raised every few seconds during daylight hours and rush hour periods. The efficiency of this digital-human interface system is amply demonstrated when what appears to be a genuine case of a stolen vehicle appears on the monitor. The procedure for dealing with it is effectively deployed, and the vehicle is stopped – all within the space of five minutes.

The ANPR system installed also helps to reduce the occurrence of ‘vehicle cloning’ (the practice whereby criminals can take the registration numbers of vehicles that are the same make and colour and fix legitimate plates from these vehicles to their own). Police forces can sometimes legitimately stop registered vehicles as part of their checking procedures, but they’ll then arrange a password with the legal drivers. In this way, the sinister practice of cloning is becoming more manageable.

The end results are felt not just in terms of increased security and crime reduction. The often controversial Congestion Charge devised by the Greater London Authority depends largely on visual images to be effectively administered. It has achieved its overriding objective, however, in reducing vehicular traffic throughout a large segment of the Capital – including the Square Mile.

To the benefit of both residents and businesses alike, it’s often quite possible to see the relatively new phenomenon of free parking spaces in areas like Finsbury Circus.

CCTV: specification is crucial

The specification of the camera and lens combination for any public space surveillance scheme is crucial, irrespective of where the cameras are located and what their precise functions may be. The scheme established for the City of London is no different.

Whether a camera is to capture suspicious body language or a very precise image of a given car’s number plate for the ANPR software to analyse, the image rendered must always be usable. The same can be said of the cameras that record the image of drivers and passengers through a front windscreen. Here, the quality of the lens and filter combination is established to minimise glare from modern car windscreens that are now installed at very shallow angles.

Back in 2001, Bagshot-based B&P Security assumed the role of project manager for the City of London installation, helping with the move to standardise with the most effective lens-camera combination throughout. Additionally, the company has afforded the City of London Police a single-source accountability to ensure the smooth running of the system.

According to B&P Security’s technical manager Robin Dansie, advances in technology have been at the heart of the integration and flexibility of surveillance.

Dansie takes up the story. “A very wide range of lighting conditions means that obtaining clear images isn’t always straightforward. In particular, night lighting or low sun angles like we have at present can make for difficult reading and capture of number plates due to reflections. Low angle sun can also be a major factor in hampering facial recognition through a windscreen,” suggested Dansie.

The system chosen by B&P Security to satisfy the demands of the City of London Police uses Sanyo cameras and Pentax lenses throughout. Added Dansie: “A combination of polarising filters on the lenses and the available shutter settings on the cameras makes the acquisition of images in a wide range of lighting conditions very dependable.”

The system has an integral fault-finding function complete with Addlestone video loss detectors. A drop to 0.2 V in a camera causes a tamper alarm to be activated. At the designated exit points there are multiplexed ground loops that will also generate alarms where vehicles are detected travelling the wrong way along a one-way street.

The major monitoring issues

Many CCTV commentators regard the UK as a saturated market offering only limited volume growth. As a result, most companies look towards EU Member States for new business.

Ten years ago the idea of public space surveillance would have been almost unthinkable due to the prevalent civil liberties legislation that pretty much prohibited the use of such systems.

The City of London Police surveillance scheme attracts interested CCTV managers from overseas on a regular basis, many of them from the European Union (EU). For his part, Andrew Mellor is as aware as any industry insider of the burgeoning Duty of Care surrounding CCTV end users. From a purely policing viewpoint, he offers the very plausible explanation that it’s not the perception of CCTV at issue here, rather the various national law enforcement agencies themselves.

“Generally speaking, other EU countries have a completely different historical approach to policing,” commented Mellor. “In Britain, we’ve traditionally enjoyed a liberal democracy whereby the police are locally-appointed citizens given the task of helping to protect their fellow citizens. By contrast, in many EU nations the police have been an arm of the state. In some instances they continue to be so. They’re not part of an equivalent to the Home Office, but instead similar bodies to the Department of Defence. On that basis, it can be suggested that they’re not there to help the public but to help the state control that public.”

Perhaps this is the reason why in EU states where this kind of policing has always been the norm, the public are far more suspicious of surveillance information residing with law enforcement bodies. Food for thought.

At the moment, Martin Sola – technical consultant with the Aver Sola Consulting Partnership – is working closely with the City of London Police to help with various planned extensions to the surveillance scheme. Sola was called in as a consultant as a result of what his company has achieved with the City of Westminster scheme (the IP monitoring ‘pilot’ having featured heavily in the August 2004 edition of Security Management Today).

“Two recent additions to the City of London scheme have been the western and northern extensions,” explained Sola. “The former comprises five new entry point and four exit point camera systems, the latter three entry and two exit camera set-ups. In addition, there’s now also an ongoing project aimed at upgrading a number of existing exit points that will require relocating cameras and narrowing roads, etc. That project has been prompted by another client in the City.”

Concurrently, a separate initiative encompasses the installation of 38 new cameras around the streets as well as a significant number for viewing from the Thames bridges, such as Tower Bridge.

Good relationships are essential

While the changes entail a degree of disruption, acceptability among City end users remains high… mainly because the benefits of surveillance are easily perceived and approved of by all. As Steve Smith noted in his conversation with SMT: “We have good relationships with all businesses and residents in the City. We have the facility to send and receive alerts via pager and e-mail regarding any security incidents. In terms of general management, another example would be if there was a power failure at Liverpool Street Station. We could quickly alter the whole City to avoid the area altogether and use other transport options instead.”

Top quality equipment for the end user, it seems, is the key to surveillance success. “It’s no good buying yesterday’s technology. We want tomorrow’s,” added Smith. “In the fullness of time we’re hoping to implement a facial mapping capability. That means we have to be reasonably sure that the CCTV equipment we currently have in place can interface with the new technology as and when it arrives.”

CCTV surveillance hasn’t always enjoyed a favourable press. While business and law enforcement agencies have been much quicker to realise its benefits – in the face of a public perception whereby some allege that CCTV is a necessary evil and/or an invasion of civil liberties – the backdrop of rising crime and nervous business interests has meant that visual surveillance is here to stay.

As far as the Square Mile’s concerned, it’s fair to say that CCTV has indeed helped bring the City back to life.