The Swindon Crime Reduction Partnership says it has developed a tripod-style deployable camera unit which can be repositioned in less than an hour to meet new operational requirements as they arise.
Working with West Midlands installers ATEC, the partnership has been placing Forward Vision’s ‘Metal Mickey’ cameras just beyond the parapet of the buildings to provide discreet CCTV surveillance of the area below.
The custom-made units are designed to sit on the flat roofs of shops and other town centre buildings and the ‘Mickeys’ then transmit images to a dedicated receiver on top of a 23-storey council building in the town centre. The system has a range of more than 30km, allowing the cameras to be moved well beyond the town centre if necessary.
The crime reduction partnership believes that criminals are finding permanently fixed cameras too easy to avoid, as the scheme’s Director Oliver O’Dell explains:
“In the past I’ve used cameras permanently mounted in fixed locations and found that incidents concentrate beyond the periphery of the camera’s range. Criminals can be very smart in avoiding the CCTV but by moving our cameras from rooftop to rooftop we will make it that much harder for them.”
Each unit has a 24-hour battery and the cameras are available in straight, 90 degree, or canted 45 degree options for installation flexibility. However, the vandal-resistant design seems to have been the key selling point for Swindon.
“In public area operations in different parts of the country I have used shoe-box style cameras and found them very vulnerable,” O’Dell says.
“In one year alone I lost GB pound 35,000 of camera equipment due to ballistic attacks, with bricks being thrown and ball-bearing guns being used. Cabling was also often ripped from the back of the camera housings. But the Metal Mickeys are tough enough to be deployed anywhere without suffering that sort of damage.”
In 2006, Swindon Town Centre announced that Automatic footfall counters would be installed around the town in order to monitor the number of people using the shops, restaurant, pubs and other services.