tensor_cctvsurveillance, Author at CCTV Surveillance

Police Requirements Overlooked

9th October 2009 4:33 pm Comments Off

Thousands of companies across the UK could find themselves unable to prosecute thieves, vandals and intruders – despite having CCTV footage of break-ins.

This is because UK police requirements for digital CCTV systems published by the Home Office last year are largely being overlooked. And without the high quality footage needed to pursue a criminal investigation, UK businesses could be losing millions of pounds by unwittingly increasing their security risks and even invalidating insurance cover.

The new guidelines were published over a year ago, but many companies seem to be unaware that there has been a change in requirements. Even amongst those that know there have been changes, there is widespread confusion about what’s required.

Effectively, this means that CCTV users are running systems that are inadequate, as footage would often not be sufficient for use by the police in any criminal investigation. These companies need to update their understanding of what’s required and update their equipment before they are left counting the cost.

In the Home Office guidelines, analogue CCTV video is no longer recommended as the preferred choice by police in criminal investigations and, when selecting a digital alternative, users are advised to consider quality, storage, export of images and playback facilities.

Under the revised requirements, users must ensure that their CCTV system is capable of storing at least 31 days worth of recorded footage in a secure environment. It should be capable of exporting both video and stills to a removable storage medium at original quality and the time and date should be accurately available for each picture.

CCTV software should have variable speed control, display single and multiple cameras, permit recordings from each camera to be searched by time and date and allow printing or saving of specific pictures with the time and date of recording.

It’s important that companies consider where their site is vulnerable before they specify a new CCTV system and select a product that will provide a high enough resolution picture from all relevant vantage points.

Recorded pictures and print outs are not as clear as live images on some systems so a full test viewing is essential and, though the police have not set a minimum quality requirement on CCTV evidence, carrying out a test to check how recognisable individuals are on the system is advisable.

The purpose of the guidelines is to make gathering CCTV evidence easier and ensure that it is more reliable in court. All CCTV cameras and recording equipment from CCTV Surveillance are fully compliant with Home Office guidelines, so providing the police with evidence-standard images is within reach of all CCTV users.

Unfortunately, at the moment, it seems to be companies that have found their systems to be inadequate following a break-in that are upgrading to effective digital systems, however, we would urge all companies that rely on their CCTV for security to ask themselves whether what they have in place is really enough.

Better CCTV Needed

4:33 pm Comments Off

Baroness Scotland has told the House of Lords that poor quality CCTV footage currently runs the risk of innocent people being wrongly arrested. She also added that "digital CCTV… will enable us, particularly when ID cards* come in, to identify those who are responsible for very serious crimes."

The Home Office have maintained that there will be no direct link between the National Identity Register and CCTV systems, however if CCTV footage of a suspect was available, it may be possible for the police to conduct a check of the image against facial images held on the Register.

For this reason, it is also very important to ensure high-quality, well-maintained footage caught on digital recording equipment is made available to the police in the event of a crime, in order to avoid incorrect arrests.

There are a large number of CCTV systems – both old and new – that do not meet current standards concerning the quality of footage obtained. Old analogue CCTV systems are likely to fall short of the police requirements, however it may not be necessary to replace your entire system in order to become compliant. A simple upgrade of certain components of your CCTV network can be enough.

Good quality footage of intruders, vandals, and thieves have been used in a number of public prosecutions by the police, and have provided invaluable evidence when linking villains to crimes.

If you are looking to upgrade your CCTV system, the engineers at CCTV Surveillance will be happy to advise you on any necessary modifications you will need to make in order to gain complicity.

*The ID cards scheme was passed by Parliament earlier this year after long running resistance from the House of Lords. Everyone over the age of 16 who applies for a passport will have their details added to a National Identity Register from 2008.

The Digital Age

4:32 pm Comments Off

In the immediate aftermath of the 7/7 London terrorist explosions, and the attempted bombings a fortnight later, the police embarked on a massive intelligence gathering exercise. Their task was significantly aided by the presence of CCTV cameras covering the streets, Tube stations and buses targeted in the attacks, as well as surveillance systems covering the rest of the transport network in the capital and surrounding counties.

The pictures subsequently produced, such as those taken at Luton rail station, showed clear, identifiable images of the perpetrators and underlined the value of this monitoring method. However, the operating costs and logistics involved in surveying so much activity means that the CCTV operators of these systems cannot be aware of all the potential crime-related activity occurring.

Their skills and training are deployed to best effect in real-time, to address and help prevent a variety of events that may otherwise result in security or safety problems. Nevertheless, finite resources are available to devote to this task, and otherwise normal behaviour such as criminals travelling to the scene of a crime cannot realistically be detected in these circumstances anyway.

This is where a valuable back-up comes into play, in the form of accessible video recordings that can later be evidentially linked to an incident.

Property surveillance

Commercial property owners and managers deal with a similar scenario. Depending on the nature and scale of the business involved, a number of different security arrangements exist. Larger sites often have their own surveillance cameras, monitored by security guards as part of an integrated protection system. Smaller facilities may prefer to employ external security providers to monitor their buildings out-of-hours. Some local authorities, for instance, keep watch on industrial estates and business parks etc using the staff available in their control room.

Whatever the chosen method, the quality of recordings is one of the key operational issues that needs to be safeguarded. To prove this point, we only have to think back to the poor state of original camera pictures showing toddler Jamie Bulger and his abductors at a Merseyside shopping centre in 1993. These had to be subsequently enhanced by police technical experts before they could be effectively used. Since then, of course, analogue VCR tape has been increasingly superseded by the prolific uptake of digital recording and this in turn has led to a pressing need for definitive guidance where digital video images are being used as evidence in the criminal justice system.

Digital Developments

The rapid change towards digital video recording technology first started in the late 1990s and in recent years has accelerated as a result of factors such as falling prices, improved reliability and a range of operational advantages. For example, compared with tape recorders, digital alternatives provide ease of use and the ability to search for specific recorded data quickly.

But the digital age also ushers in a number of important issues facing those specifying, selecting, installing and operating DVR equipment intended to produce CCTV pictures for use as evidence in court. A number of key questions have been raised about the admissibility of digital video evidence and the methods used to review and extract such evidence.

The main problem has been the lack of an independent guide that the police, criminal justice system, end-users, insurers and installers could refer to – a situation addressed by the forthcoming publication from the Home Office of a code of practice covering digital recording systems intended to export images for use as evidence.

The intention behind the code is to provide an independent benchmark for this technology, allowing it to be used to its maximum potential with the same confidence that there is in VHS tape from a traditional VCR.

The Whole Truth

4:21 pm Comments Off

The argument used to be that the camera never lies, but when it comes to evidence that will stand up in court, even industry experts now say the 4.2 million cameras in the UK do not give the whole picture.

CCTV has come to be seen as a magic bullet, but its effectiveness can be undermined by everything from the age of the equipment, through the positioning of the cameras, to something as simple as the number of times the tapes recording the pictures have been re-used.

Anyone who ever owned a VCR knows how a tape used to record a favourite soap week in, week out, would result in well-known actors becoming increasingly less identifiable as the picture quality declined with each successive recording.

"Fragile" Recordings

It is this problem that seems to be uppermost in the mind of the police as studies are made of CCTV footage in the hope that light can be shed and evidence gained against perpetrators of crime.

CCTV cameras may be far more commonplace in Britain, but many in small businesses such as corner shops and petrol stations still rely on similar analogue tape, according to industry insiders.

Peter Fry, Director of the CCTV User Group, which represents more than 500 organisations using the cameras from hospitals to councils, says: "Everyone expects far too much out of CCTV."

One of the organisation’s members, who works for a major police force in England, gives the figure of 80% of the images he is asked to examine as being "totally useless" when it comes to relying on them as evidence. The problem is that a single tape is often used to record the pictures from multiple cameras – producing an image that is a fraction of the size of the actual TV screen.

Even with digital systems, where the individual feeds can be separated off, some recorders store too little information for the picture to be blown up to a useable size before the image disappears into a mass of dots – a problem all too familiar to anyone who has ever tried to zoom in on a picture on their computer screen.

Poor Quality Images

Much of the equipment being sold was never intended for such commercial use and comes from home entertainment manufacturers looking for new markets. Also the material cannot be downloaded to another format such as DVD and that means the police have to remove the entire hard-drive as evidence.

Digital technology has meant a huge leap in the number of images that can be stored. But that in itself has become a problem. Officers investigating the 7/7 London bombings went to seize material from one local authority to be confronted by a stack of DVDs 16 feet high, according to one insider.

Wrong identification

Even when high quality images exist, and more importantly are located by detectives who have studied hundreds of hours of CCTV, questions remain about how useful they are at actually identifying suspects.

Academic research has shown that when people were given a still picture of somebody and asked to pick them out of a series of CCTV stills, they picked the wrong person or could not find them at all in 30% of cases – and that was when the two pictures were taken in identical lighting conditions with the subject displaying a similar facial expression.

Better quality images from newer digital systems have the potential to make CCTV more useful in court, according to Michael Bromby of the Centre for Forensic Statistics at Glasgow Caledonian University. But he also sounds a warning.

"If you get a DVD and stick it on your telly then it can do all sorts of things to the person’s face before it decodes the signal properly and that’s where you’re working with a limited number of broadcast standards. You have to accept that the camera and computer are doing something to compress and store the image which can alter it. And that matters where somebody is saying this is or isn’t the person, when you look at the ratio of the distance between their eyes or from their nose to the chin," he explains.

Right Place

Before the lawyers and experts can even begin those arguments though, the camera has to capture an image.

The case of Annie Freeman, an 87 year old pensioner ordered to remove her hat when she popped into a pub in Aldershot so as not to hide her face from CCTV cameras, shows how it does not take hi-tech tricks like those used by crooks in the film Ocean’s 11 – to foil the security systems.

More often though, it comes down to the cameras simply not being in the ideal place. Dr Andrew Adams of the University of Reading cites the case of a colleague who is working on cameras designed to spot potential terrorists, who had his car broken into on campus.

"Within 20 minutes he went to security staff with a description of some youths he’d seen hanging around the car park, only to find that despite all the signs warning of CCTV surveillance, not one had been pointing in the right direction to catch the suspects."

The CCTV Monitor

4:20 pm Comments Off

The best way to monitor and capture illegal activity e.g. shoplifting, is by using surveillance cameras, but what is the use of covert spy cameras if you have no monitors to see the view transmitted?

Monitors are very important when it comes to capturing video from CCTV cameras. CCTV monitors vary in size and shape, and some have different resolutions or may come in colour or black and white. Some also have audio options. In order to get a good security camera system you need to look at the specifications of both security cameras and monitors.

For basic surveillance needs you may get away with a TV or a computer screen. However for a professional surveillance camera view you should consider a special security camera monitor. You might decide to use your own TV for capturing the camera view, however this is only a good idea if you are not looking for a high quality image.

CCTV cameras use a particular number of horizontal lines to represent the image. Black and white cameras have about 380 horizontal lines, whereas coloured cameras have about 330 horizontal lines. Resolutions of up to 580 lines can be achieved with top-end digital CCTV cameras – a definition which even the most expensive television will struggle to display correctly.

CCTV camera monitors offer much better resolution compared to regular TVs, with some monitors able to handle up to 900 or 1000 horizontal TV lines. If your requirements are for a lower specification then a 330-line CCTV camera together with a 400 TV line monitor would be ample. On the other hand, if quality is crucial for your surveillance needs then go for a CCTV monitor that can handle 900 TV lines.

In addition, there are other considerations that you will need to take into account when deciding on your CCTV monitor:

Colour vs Black and White
Built-In Audio Technology
Multiple Camera Viewing

Whatever your requirements are, you can be sure that you will be able to find a security camera monitor to meet them.

CCTV Security Considerations

4:19 pm Comments Off

CCTV systems were first developed in the UK in 1970s. They used to be extremely expensive, cumbersome and had to be professionally installed due to a complicated electronic setup. Systems today are much more reasonably priced, easier to configure, and small CCTV systems can be installed by the end user.

A basic CCTV system includes a camera, monitor and recording device. Before settling on the specific components for your site, however, there are several decisions you will need to make.

Firstly, you’ll need to decide if you want a colour or black & white system. It is important to remember that only colour CCTV footage can be used in a court of law to positively identify a person. If black & white footage is installed, it will not give you evidence quality CCTV protection.

Your second consideration is whether you want to install wired or wireless cameras. Although, wireless is much easier to install, it is more expensive and can occasionally be unreliable. With a hardwired CCTV camera, it is more difficult to install, but you don’t have to worry about signal loss.

Your third consideration is perhaps the most important and comprises of five individual aspects. You need to decide:

what area you need to see
how far away this area is
how much coverage you need
what the lighting conditions are like
will it be indoor or outdoor

You have to know the answers to these questions in order to determine the correct kind of camera and lens combination.

Your fourth consideration is the type of recorder that will work best for your needs. Time lapse recorders are still available however, they have many limitations on the time and scene recorded, and additional equipment, such as a switcher or multiplexer is often required. A CCTV DVR, on the other hand, allows you to record much longer periods of time, which can be downloaded to a PC or burned to a CD. In addition, the quality of your CCTV footage will not degrade over time.

Your final consideration is the CCTV monitor. You need decide what type and size of monitor you want or if you even need one. The space constraints in the area you will place the monitor will determine what size of CCTV monitor you should get.

Many of our systems do not even require a dedicated CCTV monitor. By using sophisticated CCTV software, your system can be monitored from a normal PC screen, and can even be viewed over the internet from another location.

There are many considerations you need to take into account when installing a CCTV system, and it is often better to have on-the-spot advice specific to your site. If you would like one of our engineers to visit you onsite to provide you with a free security audit, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Think Like A Thief

4:11 pm Comments Off

Thinking like a thief is the answer if you’re thinking of installing a home security system for the first time. When looking to install a security system, the first thing to consider is to make sure it is well planned out. Look at the exterior of your house and note what type of equipment you would like to employ and where it will be positioned along with any other relevant notes.

In terms of thinking like a thief ask yourself "If I were a thief where would be the best entry point to gain access to this house?". Then you can go on to decide the best way to protect these areas.

Steel shutters, window bars and adequate locks could protect some areas. This will deter the majority of criminals. If you have vulnerable areas on your property, you may want these protected by security lighting triggered by body heat or CCTV cameras with night vision.

When you have considered all the options for the exterior, then move to the interior.

Enter your property via your previously identified access points, keeping in mind the type of security equipment that could detect your presence and what position it would have to be in.

Some security equipment to consider include:

Alarms – tend to go off regularly and therefore don’t raise concern when they go off among some housing estates, but do provide deterrent against intruders.
Passive Infra-Red sensors – will detect the body heat of any intruder and can be linked to alarms or CCTV cameras.
CCTV – offer monitoring capabilities whether viewed across a wireless link or recorded onto a DVR.
Window and door sensors – notify immediately when a threshold has been breached.

An alternative is to have the system monitored by a dedicated intruder alarm monitoring service, which, if also connected to a CCTV system, can be viewed through monitors allowing immediate decision to be made if required.

Most CCTV systems can be set up to operate on detection of motion, and then programmed to perform a number of tasks. They can again contact interested parties by telephone, SMS, and email, and can even transmit the video pictures to a dedicated website which can be viewed from anywhere in the world.

Of course, if you are operating on a limited budget, you will have to prioritise which areas of your property need protection. But please remember to use reliable security equipment from reputable manufacturers.

For further information and advice on your security and CCTV requirements, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

More CCTV Power For Home Office

18th August 2008 9:23 am Comments Off

The police and Home Office are to press for regulatory powers that will insist that every one of the 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain is upgraded so it can be deputised to gather police evidence and provide a vehicle for emerging technologies that will automatically identify people and detect if they are doing anything suspicious.

The CCTV strategy for crime reduction, which is expected to be published in December after a joint review by the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers, is also expected to be critical of the way the law governing the use of CCTV has been managed by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

The ICO has repeatedly asked the Department of Constitutional Affairs (DCA) for powers of inspection so it can check that people’s CCTV systems are being used properly – not just so that they are fit for the purpose of crime detection, but also that they are not intruding on people’s privacy. But the DCA had refused.

Even if the ICO was given the power to inspect people’s CCTV installations, it could not afford to do the work. Neither is the government willing to foot the bill of upgrading the many public CCTV networks using old technology.

Moreover, public funding would not fund private CCTV operators, which are more often found by the police to be inadequate when they turn to them for evidence.

So the CCTV review will suggest some sort of self-funding regime. This could mean that CCTV operators might have to pay a higher registration fee than the yearly £35 they pay to the ICO. Fines could also be charged to those who fail their inspections.

The review is also expected to call for a public debate on CCTV, which should please the ICO after it said that British society was being fundamentally changed by the rapid growth of surveillance and that we should pause for thought before it’s too late.

This compelling argument, combined with a review of the Data Protection Act that the DCA has hinted may weaken existing protections, combine also with the idea expected to be presented in the CCTV review that the ICO might not even be the best authority to take charge of surveillance.

The result could be that the ICO’s optimistic grab for public authority over the important issue of civil liberties versus the potential for near-total law enforcement could be checked before it has even got a hold.

The police are of the view that the rules governing CCTV were tacked onto the Data Protection Act and added to the ICO’s remit in a bit of a hurry at a time when there was no Surveillance Commissioner and no European Convention of Human Rights. Now there are both, and given that the police think the ICO hasn’t done its job of ensuring all the nation’s CCTV cameras are good enough for the police, perhaps someone else ought to take responsibility for it?

The options include the Surveillance Commissioner, which keeps an eye on the intelligence services, and the Security Industry Authority, which licences private security firms. Though they lack the one important thing that gives the ICO its authority to govern CCTV operators – custodianship of the Data Protection Act – there is an argument being forwarded as a reason to take CCTV away from the ICO.

It is thought in some quarters that the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) contains provisions enough to prevent people’s privacy being abused by CCTV intrusions, and this would allow responsibility for this sort of surveillance to be land-grabbed back from the Data Protection Act and the ICO. It is worth noting, however, that the ECHR has warned publicly that civil libertarians should not rely on it to free them from the clutches of the surveillance state.

Another argument the police are using is that the ICO is a year late delivering a new CCTV Code of Practice, which is being revised to reflect emerging technologies such as facial recognition and behavioural analysis that promise to turn the nation’s CCTV cameras into a bionic arm of the law.

Aside from the fact the ICO is short of resources, the other reason why the review is so late is that it is waiting to incorporate the deliberations of the Article 29 Working Party – which advises the European Commission on data protection matters on behalf of the information commissioners in all 25 European member states – on which parts of the data a CCTV camera captures should be considered personal data and therefore protected as someone’s private business under the Data Protection Act and the ECHR?

Information commissioners around the world share the ICO’s concern about the eye of the state intruding into the private lives of ordinary people. One of their concerns is the sort of intelligent CCTV technology described above, which the review would also try to address.

The Legal Side

27th July 2008 6:04 am Comments Off

Question

People can often be reluctant to install CCTV cameras because they believe it increases liability. Our experience is a camera system decreases liability since the owner is taking steps to provide a secure facility.

But if the system is not monitored live does this give the occupant a false sense of security? Have you ever heard where an owner is liable for cameras that are not monitored live or liable for systems that do not have complete coverage of parking areas? And does an owner legally have to post signs stating area has surveillance cameras and/or is being recorded?

Answer

The issue of camera installation continues to plague property owners and security dealers because there is so little precedent to rely upon. There are, however, some principals of law which can be applied. One is that property owners do owe their tenants and others lawfully on the property some degree of reasonable protection. The level of duty has many variables.

A landlord of a residential property has a duty to provide reasonable security when the property is known to be in a high crime area and that tenants are likely to be at risk. Also, there are laws that affect the landlord’s duty to provide some level of protection, such as front door locks and intercom systems. Of course fire protection/detection is another level of security and safety which is generally required.

Video surveillance, however, is rarely required by law. More often than not CCTV is installed by property owners as a measure to reduce property damage or to record the damage for possible police investigation after the fact.

Some property complexes do have digital CCTV with on-site guard monitoring and certainly the presence of CCTV does raise the question of liability. One who assumes a duty is then required to perform that duty in a reasonable manner. Thus, creating a sense of security by installing cameras or taking other security measures designed to instill a sense of safety will create a duty to provide that reasonable measure of protection.

Property owners would be wise to make it clear what cameras or other security is designed to do or detect. Signs just as conspicuous as the cameras would be a good start. A notice to commercial tenants that cameras have been installed but are not supervised and are for the owners property protection would be a good idea.

The public’s perception of CCTV coverage – or for that matter guard coverage – is probably not accurate with reality. Rarely are CCTV cameras manned and more often than not security guards are instructed not to get involved in an incident other than to communicate with the police to report an incident. This is not to suggest that there are not buildings where CCTV is monitored live and where guards are armed and prepared to intervene.

A reasonable person on the premises should be able to figure out what kind of security exists on the premises, and an owner creating a false sense of security should expect to be held responsible, not necessarily for the entire injury or loss, but contributing to it by the injured party not taking other security measures because of the false sense of security.

Small Shops At Risk

5th July 2008 2:45 am Comments Off

The Federation of Small Businesses has highlighted the tragic impact that crime has on shopkeepers across the UK. As more small shops are victims of crime, especially violent crime, people are losing their livelihoods, areas are becoming more deprived as jobs and facilities move elsewhere and consumers are finding their choices reduced.

Police surveys show that twenty per cent of all crimes are committed against businesses, while the FSB’s research shows that this crime costs £19 billion per year, and businesses believe that these crimes are not given the same priority as other offences.

Forty per cent of businesses do not report crimes against them because they do not believe that it would achieve anything, such is their lack of confidence in the authorities.

Regeneration projects in deprived areas and town centres are also hit by high levels of crime. Businesses close or move away and this increases the vicious circle of crime costing jobs locally, which leads to more crime.

The retail sector suffers the highest level of intimidation or threatening behaviour of any business sector – a third of small firms have been the victim of such crime in the past year. The retail sector alone loses £1.5 billion per year to crime. Shopkeepers often live above or near their business, which means that even when not working they can continue to be victimised.

The Federation of Small Businesses will be putting up rewards, subject to consultations and in conjunction with the police, for information leading to convictions in cases where shopkeepers have been murdered. This reflects the FSB’s concern about violent crime against shopkeepers and underlines the organisation’s commitment to cracking down on such offences.

The local shop is often taken for granted. Its always there when we need it and so it is taken as a given. However, one in three small shops has been the victim of intimidation or threatening behaviour in the past year.

The Government is rightly keen to regenerate deprived areas of the country. However, they cannot do so if local businesses are closing to move elsewhere. The route to success in local regeneration lies in defeating crime. Businesses can then prosper – providing employment to youths who are currently disaffected and taking them off the streets. Economic growth will then regenerate areas in a more effective and sustainable way than any Government-funded programme could achieve.

Digital CCTV systems can provide a deterrent against crimes, both large and small, and can provide the vital evidence against perpetrators in a court of law. If you are interested in installing a CCTV system on your premises, do not hesitate to contact us.

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