The 81-camera CCTV surveillance installation in the London Borough of Hackney has benefited from an investment totalling around GB pound 2 million (generated from sources including the Home Office CCTV Challenge and Neighbourhood Renewal grants, in addition to Hackney Council funding).
In addition, some GB pound 1 million has been spent on a new emergency planning suite that includes a relocated and significantly expanded Control Room for monitoring the surveillance cameras.
Technical furniture specialist Winsted has supplied a console for the Control Room, designed to ensure that the camera operators maximise the CCTV equipment’s capabilities to help safeguard residents’ and visitors’ safety, and tackle crime-related incidents as well as other disturbances.
The Prestige console specified by the Council has a modular design that allows flexibility by offering different configurations to fit each user’s specific needs and space constraints. It therefore lends itself to maximising the potential ergonomic benefits contained within ISO 11064. For the first time, this standard offers end users, specifiers, consultants and installers generic guidance on how the design of workstations and the layout of Control Rooms can contribute to the performance objectives set for the Control Centre.
In practice, this can positively and objectively assist in making decisions on matters such as equipment selection, operating practices, working environments and furniture selection. The limitations of the operator are automatically included, and potential mismatches between operator capabilities and system demands minimised. In essence, this approach involves ‘user-centred’ design.
The ISO standard can be applied to areas such as monitor viewing distances/positioning/ arrangements, lighting, ventilation, ambient noise levels, workstation finishes, design and heights, the overall Control Room layout and its surrounding environment.
Benchmarking performance
Andy Wells – Hackney’s CCTV manager – explains that he was encouraged by Winsted’s enthusiasm for the standard, and its ready provision of all the relevant information. “Winsted’s approach has certainly helped us, as it’s otherwise very difficult to make full sense of such standards when using them from scratch,” states Wells.
“We were keen to pursue an ergonomic approach in our new Control Room, and ISO 11064 seemed the best device against which we could benchmark our performance.”
Explaining how the standard has been used in practice, Wells adds enthusiastically: “For instance, we’ve spent a good deal of time working on the relationship between the controls and the operators’ posture over a typical eight-hour shift. We’ve measured key distances such as the elbow to arm length to see how equipment should be deployed most efficiently.”
Wells continues: “Over the length of a shift an average CCTV operator doesn’t sit in the pose that you would use for a formal measurement. They tend to lean backwards as if sitting in a deckchair. Therefore, we have measured the relevant eye heights of both the spot monitors and wall monitors so that when operators raise their eyes from the spot monitor to the top of the console, the next element they’ll see is the bottom of the lowest wall monitor.”
“In other words,” suggests Wells, “it all appears as one seamless piece of equipment, and is therefore user-friendly, comfortable and inviting for long term use. We want to encourage our CCTV operators to look at the back monitor wall and scan numbers of cameras at a time, scrutinising body language in particular, rather than continually pulling one image up on to a spot monitor directly in front of them.”
An interesting theory.
The perception of crime
The images being monitored by the operators include those from nine cameras surveying the Borough’s St John’s Churchyard area, where problems have included incidents such as occasional fighting occurring between passing schoolchildren, and vagrants who use the churchyard as a sit-in location during the day.
Elsewhere, the Borough’s surveillance cameras are being used to address the perception of crime among residents and visitors, and to tackle issues such as community safety from robberies, drug abuse and other types of crime (including potential terrorist attacks).
The most recent additions to the surveillance system are ten more PTZ town centre cameras. Additionally, the Control Room has access to a number of Traffic for London cameras when they’re not being used for bus lane enforcement.
The expansion of Hackney’s system from its initial complement of 32 cameras to 81 units this Spring has meant that moving into a new Control Room would become a necessity to allow for any further expansion.
Andy Wells wanted a change from an all-wood console, having experienced problems in the past with custom-built units (including scuffs, scratches and dents, as well as difficulties found in trying to relocate this type of console construction from one area to another).
“Our previous unit could never really be reassembled satisfactorily because it was tailor-made for the original location,” explains Wells. “So we looked at an alternative modular approach, in wood or steel, which would offer us much greater flexibility for expansion and reconfiguration, as well as looking modern and being likely to retain its ‘freshness’ for longer.”
Wells was faced with a choice of hundreds of colours and laminates. Opting for a natural satin black finish by way of establishing the unit visually as a working area for the operators, Wells describes the effects of the materials in the new Control Room as “very striking and efficient”.
From a practical standpoint, features such as steel fasteners which match pre-drilled holes will ensure that any future alterations to the console’s configuration will not repeat the long-term aesthetic problems suffered with removing and re-attaching screws in wood, chipboard or MDF materials. These included difficulties with items such as access panels, which looked mismatched when reassembled in the previous Control Centre.
Helping the end user
The Prestige console range boasts a number of user-friendly features. For instance, a lift-up rear hood enclosure mounted on pressurised gas cylinders allows easy access to equipment for routine maintenance.
Adjustable spot monitor supports can also be set-up to suit operator preferences. Useful vertical mounting of equipment such as telephones and door entry controllers is possible, while lockable cupboards below the console allow for handy storage of PCs and other related items.
The Prestige console also provides tidy cable management, while its vented and low profile design allows operators a visual line of sight to the back monitor wall. A specific request made by Andy Wells, in fact.
Reporting back on the specification process, Wells has praise for the continual flow of 3D CAD (Computer Aided Design) drawings provided by Winsted, which enabled his team to incorporate the console into the overall Control Room design with relative ease.
“The company has also taken a good deal of time and care to ensure that the software it uses allowed us to work with these files quite seamlessly,” says Wells. “The finished product accurately matches the original CAD drawings.”
Now that the console is fully operational in Hackney Council’s Control Room – itself located within a new emergency planning and communications operation – the Council has plenty of expansion potential to cope with any future community safety, crime and terrorist threats. One tangible addition to the monitoring activities is also being introduced.
A programme is currently underway involving a planned phasing-in of surveillance pictures from some 600 cameras located on residential estates. At present, these images are recorded remotely, but the new Control Room is being linked to a digital computer network using TCP/IP technology that will allow operators to view the scenes generated in real-time.