Recent remarks that only three percent of crimes in London were solved with the help of CCTV last year highlighted the problem of police time spent wading through endless media footage to gather evidence: inefficient, labour intensive and often with limited results.
In response, UK security and surveillance services company Scyron have got together with end-to-end services provider Steria to address the issue.
The new partnership will see Scyron’s surveillance software become Steria’s standard issue kit, principally for police services in the UK and the defence industry.
The partnership brings together Scyron’s experience in capturing, analysing, managing and presenting incident-based surveillance and evidence with Steria’s record in managing major public sector projects. The aim is to improve performance in crime and intelligence management and simplify the presentation of multimedia evidence in the courtroom to achieve more successful prosecution outcomes.
Scyron’s software can handle evidence from mobile phones, video and voice evidence, photography, and maps in addition to CCTV. Steria will use it not only to capture relevant evidence but to provide intelligent analysis of it and to edit it in a way that is presentable for court purposes.
“The police service has a huge challenge to make effective use of the ever growing mountain of potential digital image evidence to help secure more convictions,” said Tracey Lee, head of the police sector at Steria.
“The software can save 90 per cent of the time and cost it takes to manually analyse information and manage evidence, freeing up resources for front-line policing.”
Scyron’s software uses a sophisticated intelligent algorithm that triggers a surveillance/CCTV camera to record specific events or be used retrospectively from a video tape to DVDs in order to capture specific incidents. For example, it may be set to capture only people lingering longer than a specific time, such as five seconds at a specific location while ignoring passers-by. Alternatively, it can be set to trigger an alarm for a suspicious vehicle, or for people approaching a perimeter fence, while ignoring animals or unusual light anomalies.
Subsequently, Scyron’s management suite of software uses meta tagging technology, allowing surveillance officers to simultaneously identify and retrieve the logged incidents while preventing duplication of evidence. This drastically reduces the time taken during the investigation process for major incidents where typically there can be several thousand hours of potential evidence. The software provides a secure and tamper-proof audit trail of evidence to comply with DPA, ACPO, Home Office and MoPI guidelines.
“Intelligent surveillance technology can transform the huge volumes of data collected everyday via CCTV and the Internet into honed, valuable intelligence to tackle crime,” said Mike Wilks, CEO of Scyron. He added, “We plan to use technology for greater collaboration on evidence between different public services – from the police to local authorities.”
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