As the government lurches madly from one crisis to the next, it leaves a trail of debris in each area of our lives.
Inflation-busting demands with every bill; target-burdened schools and falling standards; rubbish tax and road tolls on top of what we’re already paying; HIPs packs helping downturn the housing market; porous borders and compromised databases; the impossibility of seeing a GP on Saturday or an NHS dentist anytime; going into hospital with a fracture and coming out in a box…
I’m sure you can think of many more. And that’s before we get round to the security industry.
Fifteen minutes of fame
Ironically, the rapidity of these extraordinary events could be an advantage. One crisis has been so quickly replaced by another that the media has run out of space to cram it all in.
So we’ve had fifteen minutes of Northern Rock crises followed by the guarding licensing fiasco … lost CDs fiasco … party funding fiasco … By the time you read this it’ll likely be something else.
You can almost hear the sighs of relief as the headlight glare switches from one startled rabbit to the next – Alistair Darling, Jacqui Smith, Harriet Harman … Who’d be a politician (were it not for the preferential treatment, exorbitant expenses and gold plated pensions?)
Lingering questions
With all these crises going on, the licensing ‘fiasco’ is already old hat as far as the national press and TV are concerned.
But the security industry has found itself with a lot of debris. While some will lay the blame entirely at the door of the beleaguered Home Office, from your comments on our web site it would seem that readers don’t entirely absolve the SIA from this issue. And what will happen to those companies that employed the illegal immigrants, you ask? This has, obviously, been a red hot topic on info4securiuty even though it does not affect installers directly. Even so, the good standing of this industry affects everyone who works in it.
Unusable CCTV
There are bigger implications for installers from other newsy issues. Most significant is the claim that most CCTV is unusable as evidence.
Despite TV and the nationals regularly taking advantage of sharp images of criminals for public appeals and in court reports, you don’t see much pro-CCTV coverage these days.
In my view, CCTV has been unfairly dragged into the ‘surveillance society’ debate.
Come on public – we’re the good guys. We understand you don’t want every aspect of your lives gathered up on vast government databases – even if they are fully secure and available only to the million or so ‘authorised’ employees who will have access on a need-to-know basis. Yeah, right.
CCTV is there to protect us all and, up until now, it has had a great press and public support so let’s keep it that way. The best thing the industry can do is to accept these criticisms positively and get down to addressing the problems highlighted in the National CCTV Strategy report – as the BSIA and this group are doing.
Piecing it together
After my last newsletter I was contacted by CCTV forensic analyst Dannie Parkes who is in charge of CCTV analysis for West Midlands police. He agreed that 80 per cent of footage was unsuitable for purpose but said footage did not have to be perfect to be of use and, pieced together, could convince the criminal to plead guilty and make the police’s job easier.
He thought the vast majority of users overestimated their system. Because only a small percentage of installers burned a cd to demonstrate the system’s results at commissioning, end users often not only had an over-inflated view of its capability but had no idea how to burn a disk for evidence. His view was that digital technology had made the police’s job more difficult because of the time taken to burn images.
He also thought improvements in CCTV should be driven by the insurance industry and he would like to see them set up a four-tier standard for CCTV applications, much like the EN alarm grades. He also thought covert cameras at head level should be used more, even if they did run into civil liberties problems.
What do you think of his points and, if you’ve got round to reading the mighty Home Office tome, what are your conclusions? Post your comments at the bottom of this story or email me
Sandy shore
Not that it’s got anything to do with anything, but I was amused to see this little item which brightens up the gloom and convinces me that some statistics are, indeed, totally useless. Apparently 160,000 tonnes of sand is driven away from British beaches every year. That’s 50 million buckets of sand finding its way into our cars, with 33 per cent carried on towels and blankets (surely that should be 34 per cent?)), one per cent via newspapers and six per cent via body parts. I mean who is counting all this sand? And will this blatant “shrinkage” by end users mean that before long all our beaches will have been transported inland? We must have a new government enquiry.
See you next time
Alan Hyder
Editor, Security Installer
