SWISS steel

The umbrella organisation for the city’s crime reduction strategy, SFFS operates on a partnership basis. Comprising members from the Local Authority, South Yorkshire Police and the Police Authority, health agencies, the South Yorkshire Fire Authority, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Probation Service and other relevant bodies, its key strategy is one of a number of others operating within the city to reduce crime and promote regeneration. Other initiatives with the same aim include the Annual Policing Plan and the Social Inclusion Strategy.

In excess of £3 million has already been spent on a Sheffield CCTV upgrade scheme, much of the funding for that work having been made available by the Home Office grant allocation. That said, area panels, a host of community groups and local businesses have also made sizeable contributions to the cause.

The CCTV Strategy explained

The main objective of SFFS is to help provide a safer and more pleasant environment for local people living in – or indeed visitors to – the city of Sheffield. That objective is being proactively supported by the new networks of CCTV surveillance and Help Points. The system managers’ doctrine is to reduce crime – and the fear of crime – by installing, maintaining and recording high quality CCTV systems (and thus captured images), and then responding swiftly to requests for assistance from the public.

The upgrade (including the construction of a bespoke Control Room, the installation of new infrastructure, the relocation of existing equipment and planning a fibre optic network) is now – in the words of Bob Kerslake, Sheffield City Council’s chief executive – “one of the most technologically advanced surveillance systems anywhere in Europe”.

To facilitate the expansion of the system beyond the city centre itself (and thereby encompass outlying districts where incidents of crime were high), an extensive network of fibre optic cabling had to be planned out and installed. Now covering the areas of Burngreave, Darnall and Tinsley, the system has been extended to include surveillance of stations along the Supertram route which crosses the Don Valley corridor. The route terminates at the exterior of the city’s famous Meadowhall Shopping Centre (the car parks here are also covered by the camera network).

This year alone, overall system coverage has been extended under the Anti-Street Crime Initiative, allowing additional cameras to be installed at key locations.

At strategic sites, the installation of over 40 audio Help Points – with some doubling-up to provide travel information – is a further feature of the new system. This gives members of the public an opportunity to contact the CCTV Control Room in the event of an emergency (and at any time of the day or night).

On the outskirts of the city centre, the University of Sheffield operates a parallel system. Linked to SWISS, it allows the monitoring of an extra 20 CCTV cameras and a further five Help Points in public areas located to the west of the city centre.

Effective control: an essential

Sheffield City Council’s Security Department chose advanced CCTV matrix switching, control and recording system specialist Synectics as its main systems supplier for the SWISS project.

Controlling the system’s 150-camera surveillance coverage, the SWISS project makes use of 12 individual control terminals – five in the main Control Room and seven others spread across four police stations, the South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive (SYPTE) and Meadowhall Shopping Centre. At each control terminal, Synectics’ SynergyPro touch-screen user interface is used to furnish operators with a simple, fast and intuitive route to all common system functions.

To achieve this, SynergyPro’s user-centric design considers the operational and systems environment as a whole, tackling the SWISS system’s complexity of a large number of cameras, the consolidation of operator workstations, different user groups and the regulatory environment in order to provide a simple yet extremely powerful interface.

This is very much a practical control and administration solution. A system that dramatically simplifies the human interface to video monitors, computer monitors and other disparate systems such as telephone networks, Automatic Number Plate Recognition and the aforementioned audio Help Points. Allied to this, at all times the CCTV system operators have the ability to monitor system use round-the-clock and override it as necessary.

In the event of a major incident, secondary monitoring is available via an on-screen ‘follow me’-type button. This particular function lets the operators relay camera selections to a remote terminal as the given incident is being tracked, thereby allowing South Yorkshire Police to follow an incident as it unfolds. In turn, that helps speed up response to any serious occurrence.

Overseeing the correct deployment of the CCTV system and enabling assessment of its use, the SynergyPro software is creating powerful reports for system managers. At the heart of those reports will be a single audit trail and associated visual evidence.

When quizzed about the system, Steve Godber – CCTV and security manager at SWISS – told SMT: “The user interface has really delivered the kind of flexibility in-system operation we needed. We now have an optimum workstation environment which is essential for any kind of surveillance operation if it’s going to function properly.”

Image recording to MPEG2

Godber needed a set-up that could digitally record images from each camera in real time for a period of up to 14 days. He decided to specify the Synectics Modular Digital Recording System (MDRS), already in use at other well-received schemes – like that for NCP in Manchester (‘Screen scene’, SMT, October 2002, pp24-28).

In describing the SWISS set-up recording needs, Godber explained: “Due to the fact that we wanted high resolution pictures in real time, this meant that our digital video storage requirements would be extremely large. We simply had to have a recording system that was proven to be reliable and robust.”

Godber continued: “The approach has been to integrate with ‘Best of Breed’ third party equipment for the storage element of the MDRS, something which we believe to be an important factor if you consider that the large amount of storage capacity required for the scheme represents one of the most significant IT investments a Local Authority could ever make. The solution we arrived at with our systems supplier takes into account the importance we place on robust data, future system expansion, speed of data retrieval and major incident support. It’s also a cost-effective storage solution.”

Not wishing to reinvent the wheel and simply supply a home-grown digital storage product for this highly important aspect of the recording equation, Synectics forged a healthy business partnership with IBM in a bid to bring the latter’s immense experience – not to mention its hugely successful and well-respected global product base – to the CCTV sector. The end result, the MDRS, combines ‘Best of Breed’ elements that create a truly flexible and scalable unified solution for a major town centre’s recording needs. Importantly, that includes an ability to supply camera images of sufficient quality that they’ll be admissible as evidence in a Court of Law.

Ideal for spot monitors, high risk cameras and the recording of any accompanying audio, MPEG2 provides highly detailed recordings for end users. The addition of an ‘agile encoder’ – as is the case for the Sheffield installation – also enables MPEG2 to be deployed more widely by allowing cameras to record to this particular format based on the time of day/night or specific events.

So how does the recording process work in Sheffield? First, initial recordings are made to primary storage nodes (PSNs). As the images are recorded, an MD5 hash is produced that gives each file a unique originality code. This is generated to ensure the evidential quality of all images. The PSNs are then automatically archived on an hourly basis to secondary storage, which is as in-depth as the client – in this case security manager Steve Godber, of course – requires.

Typically, storage will be in the region of ten through to 100 Terabytes (although the system is scalable well beyond this level). SWISS’ current capacity is 90.

The security of SWISS’ images is ensured by creating an environment with robust storage, strong rights management and complete audit trails. The ‘value point’ of any evidential data is all about proving the originality of the images. In practice, the MDRS achieves this by calculating a unique code for each minute the CCTV images are produced.

At this point, it’s worth major CCTV system end users bearing in mind the fact that the original MD5 hash, 128-bit code can (and must) be kept securely. The approach used on the SWISS project, whereby an ‘evidence locker’ has been deployed, is vastly different to many of the ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions available.

Image retrieval and storage

The retrieval of images using the SWISS set-up is simplicity itself for Godber and his team. Using the ‘review client’ element of the system’s software, authorised users can log-in and review images based on time, date or camera number. When any selected video footage ‘clips’ are required to be archived, or supplied as evidence, controlled copies are then sent to the ‘evidence locker’.

A robust server configured to handle the storage of evidence, the ‘evidence locker’ acts as a central focus for the Security Department when it comes to evidence management. Visual data may be archived automatically (onto LTO tape, which has a guaranteed shelf life of 35 years) or, if required for evidential purposes, downloaded to CD or videotape.

Providing a full managerial audit trail, all usage is logged onto a database. For future authentication purposes, the unique 128-bit MD5 hash code is watermarked onto every minute of evidential video footage.

If a police officer visits the Control Room and asks to take away copies of CCTV images, the system set-up at SWISS saves the corresponding evidence’s hash code in the form of a digital evidence certificate. The police officer then has to sign copies of that certificate, leaving one on site and taking the other away with the CCTV footage itself to prove its legitimacy.