Plod presses for CCTV 2.0

6 May 2008 | 15:59 BST

By Mark Ballard

POLICE HAVE revived calls for the UK's CCTV cameras to be turned into anetwork of robot deputy constables that would feed intelligence to a new breed of police station.

But plans to monitor Britain's streets with the creme de la creme of surveillance technology have been shelved because the technology is too immature. They have instead opted to develop the ideal civil surveillance system in stages.

Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, head of a state-of-the art CCTV processing unit at London's Metropolitan Police, complained that the most of the CCTV evidence available to police wasn't good enough.

Reviving calls made last Autumn for the nation's CCTV network to be upgraded, he said the UK's CCTV network had been implemented without any thought for the standards required for police evidence.

It was an "utter fiasco" he told the Security Document World Conference in London.

But most of the nations public CCTV networks were approved by local councils on the basis that they would be used as a deterrent against "anti-social behaviour", not an instrument of policing, said Dr Pete Fussey of the University of East London's Law School.

Most networks were developed piecemeal with central government funding designed to reduce the fear of crime. Now the networks have gone in, police want to make better use of it, but they have hit a wall in further development of the technology because surveys that assessed the effectiveness of CCTV have declared that it did not meat its original objectives: people behave how the want under the watchful eye of CCTV and the cameras have had little impact on the fear of crime.

Graeme Gerrard, the UK's CCTV police chief, told the House of Lord's Constitutional Committee in January that it was time we thought about CCTV differently. We should be asking now not whether CCTV is an effective deterrent, but “how effective is CCTV in the investigation of crime".

Police think its not effective enough and needs to be upgraded, but most of the networks are run either by local authorities or private businesses.

The police want to introduce a law to make private and public CCTV operators upgrade their systems so they can provide better police evidence and be automatically processed.

The first of these processing systems was to be facial recognition so suspects could be tracked automatically. But the Facial Identification National Database (Find) has been scrapped because facial recognition technology is still too immature, Gerrard told The Guardian newspaper today.

Having pared back their ambitions, police have established instead the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard, Neville's MET unit. It has built a database of suspects and ex-convicts so they can be tracked using other identifiers such as distinctive clothing.

The Home Office has also been looking at gait recognition, that
recognises someone by the way they walk.

Neville also told the conference that CCTV images of suspects would be posted on the internet. And that in Southwark, where Viido is being piloted, it was delivering CCTV images for use in 15-20 per cent of police investigations involving robberies. µ

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