Conwy County Borough Council wanted added value when it came to specifying a new surveillance regime along the north Wales coastline, with environmental monitoring as well as crime reduction very much on the political agenda. We examine a state-of-the-art digital solution – dubbed 'Project 2000' – containing some valuable pointers for town centre-style CCTV new build and upgrade schemes.
Let's be honest. There aren't too many CCTV installations out there that are so different from the norm they induce a sharp intake of breath when you first clap eyes on them. Solutions like Manchester's £3.2 million state-of-the-art National Car Parks (NCP)-operated Control Room ('Screen scene', SMT, October 2002, pp24-28) pretty much remain few and far between.

That's not to detract from the marvellous work being done by manufacturers in the medium, though, all of whom are constantly striving to break the mould – no pun intended! – with recent innovations in digital recording and IP surveillance continually being touted as 'the next Big Thing'.

At the end of the day, however, a good many end users just want to know that their CCTV installation will 'do what it says on the tin', if you like, but perhaps they ought to realise a little invention can go a long way.

Take the installation recently completed by Norbain for Conwy County Borough Council, which uses the popular clamour for town centre-style CCTV as its base point. Designed to provide round-the-clock coverage of the county of Conwy, and centred on the seaside towns along the north Wales coastline, the extremely impressive CCTV Control Room is dominated by a huge video wall, within which 54 monitors are set along three rows.

Viewed by shifts of three operators throughout the day and night, potential areas of concern are continually panned and zoomed-in on to ensure that a watertight surveillance 'umbrella' is maintained within the district at all times.

Indeed, the Control Room system – which is based around Baxall's Pyramid matrix – is one of the largest of its kind in the UK. It's already proving to be highly effective in the pursuit of crime reduction, as well as assisting in other areas of improvement to public administration.

Added value for the end user? Can't be bad.

The lead-in to 'Project 2000'
The major new CCTV system covering Conwy County, dubbed 'Project 2000', owes its scope and size at least in part to the success of the first town centre surveillance system devised and installed for Colwyn Bay back in 1996. This initial system comprising some 20 cameras predominantly located in the town centre was extremely successful in addressing the thorny issue of rising street crime. It was Local Authority-operated from a small Control Room, with video communication links to the local police Control Room as and when necessary.

Town centre managers were keen to note a 25% reduction in street crime during the system's initial year, and duly approved the installation of an additional 17 cameras at Llandudno in 1997 – this time aimed at reducing both street crime and retail theft. Such was the installation's impact that other local areas began to request inclusion.

Rather than continuing with a piecemeal approach to expanding the existing system, mandarins at Conwy County Borough Council decided on a more strategic appraisal of their longer term surveillance requirements, coming up instead with 'Project 2000' – a proposal that wasn't only technically advanced but also highly innovative in its funding arrangements.

A Crime and Disorder Audit in the County identified that the levels and nature of local crime justified a CCTV set-up. Armed with this justification, the County was able to require 50% of its funding through the Home Office's CCTV Initiative. The remainder emanated from town and County Council budgets and elements of the private sector, leading to the formation of a balanced funding partnership.

For one thing, the widespread support received for 'Project 2000' disproved one of the theories often thrown at town centre systems – namely that they simply displace crime rather than cause a genuine reduction in its occurrence. The experience at Colwyn Bay clearly refutes this idea.

If the entire town centre is under camera surveillance (or, in the case of the Conwy scheme, more than one town centre) then almost all of the area for a given type of targeted crime is covered. The perpetrators of street violence, for example, will not foresake the crowded nightspots and take their trouble-making to deserted rural areas.

Specifying the right equipment
The Conwy project has been built on a commitment to high quality equipment that proved so successful in the earlier system. Gwyn Hughes, the independent security consultant appointed to design and project manage the whole deal, takes up the story.

"We knew that high quality images were essential in a CCTV system that was to be used for crime prevention," states Hughes. "To obtain images of the clarity required by the police when investigating crimes and achieving successful prosecutions from CCTV evidence, as stipulated in the Police Scientific Development Branch guidelines, end users must seek out the very highest specification cameras and recording equipment."

For 24-hour camera operation like that in Conwy, this means using not just high resolution and day/night variants, but also infra-red switching, integration functionality (for building up pictures in poor light conditions) and peak white inversion for back-lit images.

"For police purposes it's not always sufficient for the CCTV scheme operator to drop back into black and white operation at night in the normal way of day/night cameras," adds Hughes. "There are times when colour images will be essential, even in poorer light". Hughes also knew that digital recording was the right route to go down because of its ability to capture high quality images while providing operational advantages over standard analogue alternatives. For the Conwy project, the recorders had to be set to a high frequency.

"We decided to capture images at up to 50 pictures per second on 10-channel recorders rather than go for the less expensive 16-channel option," opines Hughes, "as experience had taught us that this additional frequency of image capture was worth that bit more of an initial investment."

Inside Conwy's Control Room
The Control Room is linked to 80 remote cameras by way of fibre optic cabling, with a small number of mobile cameras being radio-linked via a local node point to the fibre optic network. The geography of the area covered would have allowed for line-of-sight microwave connections, but this may have risked transmission degradation in the event of sea mists. Landlines were the chosen option.

All communications within the Control Room are based on a stand-alone LAN, eliminating the possibility of an 'outsider' hacking into the system. An additional radio voice link enables retailers and other businesses in the town centre to contact the Control Room if they become aware of anything suspicious, or require police assistance.

The three Control Room operators on duty at any one time have workstations built around Baxall's Pyramid video management system, with a similar fourth station being used for the playback and viewing of imagery by the Council staff (and, if required, by the police). In addition to the two monitors at each workstation used for the detailed handling of incidents, the 54-screen video wall is constantly scanned by the CCTV operators to maintain a broad view of what incidents are occurring across the county.

Control Room furniture specialist Winsted supplied the 18 bay-wide, three tier-high video wall together with the 12-bay control console. Both units are based on the System 85 modular frame design. Ergonomics were a central element in the design and installation stages, with Winsted adopting the principles contained in the international standard ISO 11064 which examines the ergonomic design of Control Rooms (see 'Room to manoeuvre', SMT, April 2003, pp40-42).

For the first time, ISO 11064 offers end users, specifiers, consultants and installers generic guidance on how the design of Control Room workstations – and, indeed, the layout of the space itself – can contribute to the performance objectives set by management.

The standard may be applied to issues like monitor viewing distances/positioning/ arrangements, lighting, heating and ventilation, ambient noise levels, workstation finishes/ design/height, the overall Control Room layout and its surrounding environment.

Recording is by way of 15 Baxall hard disk recorders. Continuous recording takes place in a machine room on LAN-connected Baxall DTL 920e Simplex recorders complete with 320 Gb storage capacity. At each of the workstations and the playback station is a Baxall DTL96CE recorder handling LAN connection and CD writing which is used for real-time recording and playback of specific incidents. Should the police wish to take copies of images for identification and/or other evidential purposes, this is provided by the playback station via the BAXNet keyboard and WaveReader software.

In addition to all of the digital recording devices, there are also two VCRs used for real-time recording at the workstations.

Incident logging systems
With a large workload of incidents to track, Conwy's CCTV managers took the decision to dispense with their paper-based system of incident logging and instead have commissioned a bespoke computerised logging system – now known as CMIS and supplied by Roof Space (UK).

In practice, the operators are continually linked to various police departments so that any incidents – either anticipated or in progress – can be dealt with accordingly. Such links to the police are key to the system's effectiveness. The operators are able to patch a signal through to the nearby police Control Room, and then maintain voice contact with the police Control Room staff. They in turn direct their police units on the ground as required to prevent or address the identified activity.

It will come as no surprise to learn that the Control Room's operators are fully-trained in the latest techniques for observing street crime through CCTV, both zooming-in for identification purposes and zooming out to ensure evidential coverage of the full area where a given incident is occurring.

For those issues that don't directly involve the police – for example public transport, trading standards or sea safety matters – operators have the facility to alert the appropriate Local Authority department directly. There are also cameras on the system covering a number of Council depots, some of which boast PIR-driven alarm systems.

Tim Rowlands of StreetCam, the installation company behind the CCTV system's delivery, explains his view of the final set-up. "From my perspective, I firmly believe that this is the most technically advanced public safety CCTV system in the UK," he suggests. A bold claim indeed. "On top of the 80 cameras, there are also the four Pyramid-based Control Room workstations, the huge video wall, 15 digital video recorders and the LAN /WAN communications networks."

Overall responsibility for the Conwy system falls to Charles Phillips, the chief environmental and security officer at Conwy County Borough Council. "We're able to use the CCTV system for environmental monitoring to spot littering and graffiti, illegal traders and the operation of unlicensed taxis as well as traditional crime events in making full us of its potential," states Phillips. A point which should not be lost on those end users currently looking to upgrade their existing town centre operation.

Source

SMT