Given that its output has included Brookside, Ken Dodd’s Diddymen, shell suits, Kevin Keegan perms and politically inoffensive comedians like Stan Boardman, it’s perhaps easy to see why Liverpool has not always been promoted as a classy cultural enclave.
However, after comfortably seeing-off Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Oxford and Newcastle in the June 2003 battle to be named European Capital of Culture 2008, that situation has begun to change. And how.
Winning the Culture accolade is realising an estimated GB pound 2 billion worth of additional inward investment for the city, which was – with good reason, in SMT’s view – branded ‘Livercool’ in a recent edition of Tatler magazine.
“As the city approaches its 800th Birthday, this is the end of an era for us,” suggested bid leader Bob Scott in the wake of former head of the Royal Opera House, Sir Jeremy Isaacs, announcing the Capital of Culture ‘election’ result. “The end of The Dark Days.”
One suspects Scott was harking back to the 1980s and 1990s, a time when Derek Hatton – then controversial deputy leader of the City Council – was found guilty of manipulating the rules of the district Labour Party. At the time, the city was continually engulfed in scandal, Militant Tendency-inspired industrial action and poverty. Vast tracts of the metropolis became urban wastelands. Oh, and let’s not forget the Toxteth Riots. Dark Days indeed.
Now, Liverpool is fast-becoming an urban heartland of national and worldwide envy. One of the UK’s largest cities, its 500,000-strong population is continually boosted by an influx of tourists, many of whom are desperate to see the birthplace of The Beatles, arguably the greatest band of all time.
There are other reasons why they’re heading for the Home of Merseybeat, though. For starters, there’s the magnificent, Merseyside Development Corporation-rejuvenated, Jesse Hartley-designed Albert Dock area that plays host to the largest group of Grade I-listed buildings in the UK. It’s full of trendy bars and vibrant restaurants, also serving as home to The Tate Gallery and The Maritime Museum.
Despite its decline in status during the 1990s in the face of fierce competition from Manchester, Liverpool has recently been voted the ‘most improved city for shopping’ in the nation by retail experts Gerald Eve. The current renaissance of the retail area began in the late 1990s when Neptune Developments acquired the Queens Square district and developed new facilities including thriving street cafes grouped around the Marriott Hotel. At the same time, MerseyTravel embarked on a major investment to build the new bus passenger facility that now stands proudly on Roe Street.
No surprise that all the major marques – Littlewoods, John Lewis, Boots, HMV, Next and H&M among them – have taken up residency.
CCTV in Liverpool: the history
It’s a sad fact of life that wherever major retailers congregate, so too do would-be thieves. In that respect, Liverpool is no different to any other major city in England, but has perhaps suffered more than most from petty crime including shop theft, needless vandalism, car theft and anti-social behaviour in what has been a depressed local economy.
A desire to do something about this always existed – a desire necessarily hastened by the European Capital of Culture Award – but positive action requires money. Until recently, anyway, funding has been hard to come by.
Detective Sergeant Lee Walters (the operations manager for Liverpool’s all-new City Watch CCTV scheme) takes up the story.
“Five years ago, there were only 27 cameras monitoring the city centre,” sighs Walters. “They had been bought by the City Council, and were operated by a private security firm from a base at Clayton Square. We really needed more cameras and a more sophisticated solution if we were going to make any inroads on crime.”
A Working Group was duly formed to target the Home Office for funding under the Crime and Disorder Act (according to Walters, “one of the best-ever Acts of Parliament, because it forced the police and the Council to work together in partnership”… the end result being City Watch). Funding that would help sustain Liverpool’s own Crime and Disorder Reduction Strategy, in fact.
An initial Government grant of GB pound 2.5 million has since been supplemented, enabling the Liverpool CitySafe Partnership – whose members include the City Council (underwriter of the CCTV project), Merseyside Police, Liverpool City Police and MerseyTravel – to procure a GB pound 6 million turnkey surveillance system that costs GB pound 1.4 million per annum to run and is now rightly regarded as one of the most sophisticated of its kind in the UK.
Operational security service
City Watch is the overarching name for the operational security service that resides within Liverpool City Council’s Community Safety Department, and which is staffed by a partnership of Council monitoring operatives and serving Merseyside Police officers (five of whom act as pure CCTV operators).
Designed by consultant Masons Communications and specified by celebrated engineering consultancy Faber Maunsell (whose project manager Jason Todhunter was a major driving force behind the scheme), the core CCTV set-up was installed by Siemens Building Technologies Security Systems.
It comprises more than 250 general surveillance cameras (50 of which are dual-purpose Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras, with six dedicated to ANPR), over 70 km of fibre optic cable (laid by Skanska, and equivalent to a staggering 200 miles-plus of cabling), 12 Help Points (for members of the public to request assistance any time of the day or night) and a Control Room housing the very latest intuitive systems (of which more anon).
“Liverpool was definitely a late starter in CCTV terms,” comments Tony O’Brien, business development director for Siemens Building Technologies Security Systems. “However, most other city centre schemes rent the fibre network. With this scheme Liverpool City Council own it.” A point well worth making – according to Sergeant Walters, that ownership “eliminates network rental charges in excess of GB pound 250,000 during each year of operation.” Indeed, the Council is now considering renting out space on the network for other uses. Time will tell if that happens, but already there are huge savings to the tax payer.
Monitoring: the project ‘nerve centre’
The hub of Liverpool City Watch is the CCTV and Security Control Room. Located in the vicinity of Georges Dock (we cannot say exactly where for security reasons!), it is used to monitor images from four key zones – Liverpool Centre, North Liverpool, Kensington and South Liverpool, covering an urban landscape five miles North, South and East of the central area – on a video wall housing no less than 60 monitors (there’s space for another 18 as the system expands).
Council staff in the Control Room operate on a 35-hour week (with nine-hour days, or eight-hour shifts if working overnight). “We’re in the process of licensing the in-house operatives with the Security Industry Authority,” urges Sergeant Walters, as if pre-empting my next question. “We keep all of the digital recordings for 31 days, and can archive footage for seven years on our 70 Terabyte-capacity system in line with the ACPO policy on the retention of evidence. That decision is up to us.”
Walters began his police career in 1978, originally as a beat patrol officer and then as an immediate response driver. Moving on to the Drug Squad, he thereafter spent 17 years in CID as a detective sergeant. He’d worked on the communications side of policing for two years, which is the main reason why he was then seconded to the City Watch CCTV operation.
Four years in the role, Walters has another two to go. Not that he’s counting the days. Far from it. Walters is justly proud of the fact that, in its first three months of operation, his CCTV regime observed 2,500 incidents and resulted in 400 prosecutions.
“In the last quarter alone we’ve been able to attribute around 450 arrests to the CCTV system,” he says, proudly. “On average, 30-35 arrests per week are being made on the strength of our images. One of the major benefits with it is retrospective investigation. We deal with law enforcement agencies, Her Majesty’s Customs, the Department of Work and Pensions and many more bodies besides. Their investigators can come in and interrogate the system post-event.”
Interestingly, Cash-in-Transit robberies are also down in the area thanks to the ANPR cameras now dotted around the city, which can capture the licence plates of getaway vehicles. “Add CCTV to the ANPR and you can capture the driver’s face and those of any passengers,” states Walters. “It’s superb.”
Addressing the requirement of City Watch’s system operators for a high level of flexibility, Synectics’ SynergyPro control software has been deployed at five workstations in the Control Room. Its ‘human interface’ to Liverpool’s multi-vendor hardware, ANPR and audio Help Points furnishes Walters’ operators with a fast route to all common system functions. Allied to this, at all times the Control Room supervisors can monitor system usage and override its operation if and when it is necessary to do so.
A ‘camera state’ function is available at each of the workstations which verifies and displays a camera’s status at that time (be it locked, in use or in ‘incident’ mode). “This is particularly useful to us if camera positions have been vandalised, or purposefully moved out of position to prevent criminal activity from being detected,” explains CCTV controller William Vaughan on SMT’s tour of the facility. “The function means that we can check the operation and position of all cameras in an instant and initiate call-out maintenance.”
In practice, that maintenance will be administered by Kevin Grogan, the service team leader at Siemens Building Technologies Security Systems.
Fully-documented audit trail
The ‘Incident’ function is used by Liverpool’s operators when tracking a ‘live’ event on screen, thereby creating a fully-documented audit trail of that occurrence. It ‘locks out’ other station operators from using the specific ‘live’ camera during the tracking sequence. The date, along with start and finish time for each event, is stored automatically within the evidential video created, and then tagged with a full audit trail of information indexed to the operator’s initials.
At this point, Vaughan chips in again. “Prioritised supervisor access allows the tracking of an event so that we can determine which cameras were used to view the incident, how and when they were moved, the sequence of camera switching and which Control Room operator was in charge of them at that time.”
Assessment of the system’s correct use – or indeed any abuses – is vital. Lee Walters had already pointed out that his operation must be conducted within the guidelines laid down by RIPA, the Human Rights Act and, of course, the Data Protection Act (operational signage is included on every camera). System misuse could include operators viewing the windows of private residences or businesses either intentionally or otherwise.
Potential misuse is prevented in the Liverpool scheme thanks to the addition of a PRIVacy masking feature. When applied to any area of a scene under video surveillance, an onboard image processor mounted at the camera head generates a tracking 3D ‘spatial mask’. This varies proportionately in size and position during PTZ operations initiated with the cameras.
Within major public space surveillance systems such as this one, the sheer number of cameras means that operators devote much of their time to the manual control of key cameras. To ensure that no cameras are left static for long periods of time, the Control Room system has been programmed by Walters to include PTZ camera tours. These are split into two variants: a day tour concentrating on road intersections and the main shopping areas (including the St John’s Centre, Clayton Square, Church Street and Bold Street) and a night tour, which keeps a watchful eye over pubs, nightclubs and cash machines in line with the desires of Liverpool Leisure Alert.
“It’s important that members of the public and would-be offenders can see the cameras moving from time to time,” adds Walters. “This helps to reinforce the presence of the cameras, and keeps people guessing as to what my operators are watching.”
If an incident occurs that may require additional support, the Control Room operators can directly route live camera video via the fibre link to a plasma monitor located at police headquarters. This enables police controllers to follow an incident as it develops, allowing a full assessment to be conducted and the commitment of an appropriate level of resource to deal with a given problem.
Handling the evidence
As you might imagine, such an array of cameras – the Liverpool scheme plays host to PTZs and domes, colour and monochrome models and ‘Metal Mickey’ vandal-proof ‘specials’ – creates a huge amount of visual information to process (and potentially retain for further investigation). Catering for this, the Liverpool scheme makes use of a dedicated Evidence Locker management system.
“All usage is logged on to a database,” says Walters. “For future authentication purposes, a unique 128-bit MD5 hashing encryption code is created with every minute of video footage. If a copy of some footage needs to be taken off-site, the system will save the video clip and evidence hashing code, which is logged and detailed in the form of a Digital Evidence Certificate to prove its legitimacy.”
For long-term storage, visual data is archived to DVD (or downloaded to CD if required in Court). This process is carried out in a separate Review Suite adjacent to the main Control Room. If a written police request is submitted to Walters and his team, footage is burned to CD and delivered to, say, the main St Anne’s Street Police Station in a sealed box. The police then produce a working copy.
High definition video footage is proving to be beneficial in a number of ways, some of them not connected with crime prevention and/or detection. For example, distributed user Liverpool Urban Traffic Control has limited access to the surveillance system, which assists with its management of vehicular movement around the city. During rush hours, potential ‘bottlenecks’ can be spotted and eased through the manipulation of traffic signalling.
Accidents are also monitored and recorded, allowing the emergency services to be summoned quickly and efficiently. The traffic cameras boast 20:1 zoom lenses.
Integrated security in action
City Watch’s CCTV cameras are now being monitored alongside other electronic security systems, allowing the City Council to provide a range of monitoring services to both commercial concerns and residents. For example, Walters’ operation now monitors around 700 intruder, fire and personal attack alarms, with the CCTV being used to ‘home in’ on the scene of an activation. Resources can then be deployed accordingly.
As stated, the scheme is also linked to numerous Help Points. Members of the public who are in distress, or perhaps need some advice, can then call the Control Room. The nearest camera is automatically trained on the individual concerned, and assistance duly seconded if necessary.
Importantly, the City Watch scheme has also provided nigh on 200 radios to Liverpool’s Street Crime Wardens who are on the look-out for business crime, incidents of racism, domestic violence and ‘Pupil Watch’ (ie reporting truancy). Still images can be captured and sent wirelessly to hand-held Personal Digital Assistants such that Wardens might identify lost children and suspected thieves who have been caught on camera.
“Communication really is two-way,” enthuses Walters. “We can use the CCTV system to track suspected criminals across the city under what we call ‘Camera Pursuit’ until such time as a police patrol is on scene to apprehend and question them. There’s no need for flashing lights and sirens, which may cause car thieves to drive wrecklessly and lead to death or serious injury. The degree of trust between the police and the Council staff is total. We’re probably spotting around 50 stolen cars each day with the ANPR system.”
Liverpool’s is one of the first security installations to benefit from a direct link to the Police National Computer, in fact, enabling fast cross-matching of number plates.
Liverpool City Council’s pre-2008 mission is to “create a modern, cosmopolitan and confident premier European city at the heart of a progressive and confident region”… There’s no doubt the City Watch CCTV installation is helping to realise that goal. It is the epitome of how a Control Room should be maintained and managed, and the results thus far (including several arrests for drug dealing) speak for themselves. To his great credit, though, Sergeant Walters is always looking to make further progress.
“We’re now involved with some academics looking at the psychological side of CCTV, and we’re also consulting with Siemens on facial recognition with a view to installing multi-pixel cameras for crowd observation,” outlines Walters. “Smart CCTV is another area of massive interest for us.”
The great city of Liverpool is soon to be the European Capital of Culture. For many observers, it is already the Capital of CCTV.
