Love it or not, it’s now firmly established as the world’s most important annual security event.
For editorial types like myself it’s a non-stop cavalcade of fun and frolics – not to mention hard work – that sets us up with material for the rest of the year. Conversations will become features, launches will be become Bench Tests, insider tips will guide readers to hot new areas.
Our full round-up of the event will be in the July edition of Security Installer but expect to see new products from the show included in the magazine and on our website info4security throughout the summer.
Meanwhile, see our online photo gallery and remember to send your photos to us.
Anti-CCTV bias
IFSEC 2008 kicked off in the wake of police criticism of CCTV, whipped up, as usual, by the national media that has a thinly-veiled anti-CCTV bias.
A number of exhibitors I spoke to agreed that this was not only unfortunately timed but also unfair considering the communal-bending-over-backwards the industry is engaged in.
We know images are not perfect, neither is access to them, but could any industry be striving to do more to help their users? And be improving at a faster rate?
I thought one comment made to DM’s Pauline Norstrom during a radio broadcast perfectly illustrates how CCTV repeatedly gets unfair treatment.
This issue and the long-running analogue/IP transition formed a backdrop to the show and provided much conversation, including these comments on our IFSEC video report.
Eighteen with a bullet camera
In the IFSEC technology charts, video analytics, star turn for the last couple of years, was still up there as a top selling CCTV concept. (But considering you couldn’t move for little onscreen yellow and red boxes, how much longer will manufacturers be able to sell this to installers as new?)
In the charts for the first time was thermal imagining, just starting to become mainstream. Whether or not this really happens probably depends on a price drop, but expect to see it become an increasing part of the armoury.
Bubbling under was lots of talk on the rapidly growing H.264 compression standard. But in at number one was megapixel camera technology which featured in the new CCTV line up of most major manufacturers.
Forum could open up IP
There were also several juicy news items, not the least of which was the momentous decision by three major companies – Sony, Axis and Bosch – to band together to set up an open forum which will develop a standard for how network video products should communicate with each other. Hurrah! At last, products and systems talking the same language. I’m sure many other companies will want to get involved with this before the end of the year and it could ignite a spark under the UK’s take-up of IP.
Folly of youth
Meanwhile post-IFSEC, security maintains the highest of profiles. Despite endless gimmicks from the Home Office, a respected report says that fighting youth crime has been an outright failure with every target missed.
Not great news is it? This is no small category, despite the fact that the British Crime Survey doesn’t include it. So how much real use has it been?. Given that young teens are the most likely victims of “hot product theft”, it’s good to see that the BCS is now being extended.
Under-sixteens are responsible for a lot of the behavior that sparks the call for alarms and CCTV in the first place. But the failure to stem this is not, necessarily, a judgment on electronic security.
Fuelled with alcohol and surging with testosterone aggression, they fear nothing: CCTV, police, the courts, detention (not much chance of that) and certainly not their schools, parents or any other adult.
After mutilating some poor innocent, they end up in court but can’t be named “for legal reasons” – that is, they’re juveniles, so have to be protected.
Naming and shaming might not work with the young shameless but there’s just a chance it could belatedly shake the parents into some sense of responsibility for the rest of their offspring.
A new approach is needed and, while it might be clutching at straws, the Home Office’s latest “initiative” to turn the tables on young thugs by filming them and harassing them at home might be surreal enough to work.
It seems to have slightly more potential than the similarly gimmicky “marching them to a cashpoint to pay on the spot fines” policy that never looked likely to work, or even the now discredited ASBOs.
Morally bankrupt
Should we be surprised at all this crime when, according to a new survey, almost a third of Britons lack that sense of guilt that would deter them from committing an offence.
This revealing survey by G4S Security Services also found that 38 per cent of us had committed a crime such as shoplifting or fare avoidance in the last five years.
Shocking indeed, although it does include some wide categories such as ‘taking stationery home’ which might falsely give the impression we’re all dishonest. There’s a big difference between an inadvertent paper clip and regular boxes of printer paper, but surveys generally demand yes/no answers.
I once found a stray office pencil on my desk at home and a few years ago I ate a loose grape before taking the rest of the bunch through the checkout. Oh the shame! But I feel better now I’ve admitted it.
See you next time.