Case study: The benefits of IP surveillance (part two)

The very fact that high quality surveillance images can be provided to the police when incidents occur at the Douglas Court Shopping Centre has definitely led to a more collaborative, symbiotic relationship. “They proactively provide us with information about known wrongdoers that are operating in areas close to our shopping centres,” comments Ted Nolan, security and Health and Safety manager. “If there’s a security incident, the police know that the trip is unlikely to be a wasted one. Their response is rapid.”

With great enthusiasm, Nolan continues: “The technology is now there to enable automatic alerting, and we could back this up with time-stamped surveillance images of vehicle occupants. We believe this sort of system has already been deployed in the newly redeveloped Bull Ring Shopping Centre in Birmingham. We’d also like to explore the use of two-way audio to create a further deterrent to bad behaviour, or even to warn known wrongdoers.”

Douglas Court Shopping Centre boasts a Category 6 data network tied to a one Gigabit fibre backbone running through the internal part of the site. All cameras deliver two frames per second on motion. The system collects 150 days of recording.

Richard Cronin (managing director at RPC Consultants) explains: “The low frame rate doesn’t impact on our ability to pick everything up because of the wide field of view that all cameras are set up to deliver. It’s not possible to get into and out of this Shopping Centre without being spotted by more than one camera. Frankly, we’re looking for good quality still images which can be used for identification purposes rather than high quality video. For us this would be unnecessary overkill, and would mean that we would have to reduce the number of days of recordings we keep.”

The decision to collect images for so long was taken because of the legislation around ‘slip and fall’ claims which stipulates that claims of this nature can be filed up to two years after the incident itself.

“The feeling here was that collecting images for five months was realistically going to be long enough in that very few would take longer than this to make a formal claim for compensation following an incident,” adds Cronin.

Claims now almost eliminated

The Shipton Group’s management team decided to reduce their exposure to ‘slip and fall’ claims through a combination of rigorous cleaning regimes and surveillance. The system deployed at Douglas Court Shopping Centre involves cleaners that monitor specific, designated areas.

These cleaners are required to conduct regular checks. They carry electronic recorders which they place on top of checkpoints mounted throughout the Centre. These recorders log when specific identified cleaners have been there, and at what time, and then pass this information back to a central database.

In addition, if there’s a breakage or spillage they can be contacted by radio and notified to visit a specific area, mark out the affected area to stop customers walking on it and then clean it. Cronin highlights: “I’d be very surprised if there was a single spillage in this Centre that has not been spotted, cleaned up and/or marked out within two minutes. This speed, combined with the swipe card and time-stamped surveillance system enables management to put up a very robust defence against personal injury claims on Shipton’s premises.”

Surveillance is used to provide additional protection to management in cases where claims or complaints are made. If the electronic tagging system indicates that a cleaner was on site within a specific timeframe after a spillage, for example, it’s then possible to go to recorded images from the nearest surveillance camera for that period to verify that the appropriate cleaning has been done.

This system can also be triple-checked through the use of manual records of the cleaning rounds that staff have been detailed to carry out. It may even identify the opportunist claimant in action to see if they engineered the fall, and what they did immediately after they stumbled.

“Many claimants simply give themselves away by falling over in areas where we can clearly see there was no obstruction or spillage whatsoever,” comments Orla Lannin, centre manager at the Douglas Court. “They then get up and often go off and quite happily do their entire week’s shop for well over an hour before bringing the incident to the attention of staff. If we can show them on camera doing that it tends to silence the majority very rapidly.”

Nolan then clarifies the situation further. “If people see high quality images of incidents which customers have claimed as ‘slip and falls’ due to a spillage, for example, people making dubious claims very soon melt away. We normally show them the images from ten minutes before and up to ten minutes after the incident to illustrate that if spillages did occur they were cleared up rapidly and effectively and marked out while still drying.”

Health and Safety monitoring

No less than 35 Axis network cameras have been deployed in the 11 corridors and passageways serving the retail outlets. These corridors enable retailers to move goods from the loading bays at the rear of the site into the stores themselves. They also offer statutorily required fire and emergency escape routes. By law, these passageways must be kept free from obstructions at all times.

Cameras deployed here enable management to ‘spot check’ these corridors to see if tenants are blocking the corridors close to the rear of their stores – either using them to store waste packaging, or even as a temporary storage area for goods or equipment due to go into the shop later in the day.

“Ultimately, we’re liable if these corridors aren’t kept clear and there’s a need for evacuation of the building which is subsequently impeded through abuse of these spaces,” says Lannin. “Cameras provide us with information about repeated blocking of these corridors, and warnings will be issued as and when necessary.”

In the run-up to Christmas, as you’d expect the Douglas Court Shopping Centre becomes steadily busier. From November, Lannin and her team keep a close look out for rising traffic numbers in the car parks and around the Centre using the CCTV cameras.

“When we see increased congestion we might deploy additional staff in key ‘choke’ points such as in the car parks and entrances to help direct shoppers to where they need to go. We might also deploy more people collecting and redistributing trolleys, for example. The cameras provide us with the eyes and ears for the business, wherever we are, so that we can help centre managers when and where they need it.”

Managing and locating recordings

Douglas Court Shopping Centre staff use the Milestone XProtect Enterprise 5.6F version system to manage and help locate recordings quickly. The Milestone system is installed on two Dell Power Edge 2950 servers, handling images coming from all 76 network cameras in use across the Centre. These servers hold ten days’ worth of live images (one server takes images from 64 cameras, the second from 12).

All images are also collected on the Dell EMC AX 150 five Tb storage area network. A total of 260-280 Gb of images are collected from all cameras per day. The stored area network device offers ample capacity for the addition of up to 40 more cameras today, and should enable upgrades to megapixel cameras without the need for additional storage infrastructure.

Recordings older than ten days are transferred onto an Ultrium 3 Tape Library and then deleted from the 2950s to make way for new live images. From the tenth day, the tape system automatically archives all new images once per day and once every four weeks RPC manually rotates tapes out of the system and puts new ones in. These are stored separately and new tapes loaded into the library. An additional Dell Power Edge 1950 server handles data coming from the ANPR cameras.

Further work was carried out by project consultant RPC to enable quick access to cameras by security staff. Cronin adds: “We decided to deploy the 295 Joystick at the Customer Service Desk so that security staff can hop around between cameras very quickly, pan and zoom in and out and access the views they need fast. The open API for this device enabled us to write a simple software program to give our security staff very good system control. We are able to use this to access all the cameras.”

Power over Ethernet

All internal static cameras are using Power over Ethernet (PoE) via a total of five Cisco Catalyst Express 500 Series 10/100 Base-T PoE switch devices attached to the fibre backbone, split between the Communications Room itself and two designated, separate server racks.

RPC Consultants has designed the system such that no camera is more than 95 metres from the nearest rack which travels in overhead ducting through the centre of the building. This ensures that PoE works effectively and consistently. The Communications Room also holds a PowerDsine switch for delivery of 30 W of power which is needed for the IPIX Command Dome.

The use of fixed cabling to serve the cameras in the car park would have meant significant civil works costs, and caused massive disruption to customers, ultimately affecting retail revenues for several weeks (if not months).

Cronin explains the value of moving to IP-surveillance for wireless deployment. “What we identified was that if we wanted to use analogue CCTV cameras in the car parks, this meant we would be tied into proprietary equipment for the entire wireless infrastructure in addition to the cameras. By going with networked cameras, we knew we could select Best of Breed wireless solutions.”

Cisco Aironet 1310s have been used (14 in wireless bridges mode and four in wireless access points mode, as a point of fact) to serve the entire car park. Interestingly, testing of all this equipment took less than a day per wireless bridge, and caused no disruption to any customers whatsoever. Pretty much the ideal scenario, then.

Onsite and remote monitoring

Live monitoring is carried out from the information desk positioned at the heart of the Shopping Centre. All cameras can be easily selected and viewed from a total of three screens at this location.

Split screens offer the opportunity to comfortably display images from up to 16 cameras on each screen at any one time.

Security staff normally have at least one screen dedicated to viewing external cameras, one screen on key internal cameras in the public areas and one covering the service corridors. Images may also be viewed from the manager’s office and remotely.

For their part, The Shipton Group’s management fully understands the power of remote monitoring from its headquarters in Carragiline, five miles distant of the Douglas Court Shopping Centre. From here, authorised users and security management staff are able to view outputs from more than 144 CCTV cameras currently operating in its Shopping Centre in Blackpool. These senior individuals can also now view the 76 network cameras in place across Douglas Court. It’s exactly the solution they craved.