COPY: CCTV: Neighbourhood watched

It is almost 30 years since the first local authority CCTV system turned its lens towards a housing estate. King’s Lynn and West Norfolk Council’s camera network was set up in 1987.

But it wasn’t until the early 1990s and the murder of Liverpool toddler James Bulger that CCTV, or to give the system of surveillance cameras its full name, closed circuit television, really caught the public’s attention. Fuzzy camera footage showing the toddler being led from a busy shopping mall by his killers put the technology in the media lens. CCTV failed to prevent the crime but the images, endlessly replayed on TV, offered hope that the killers would be caught.

Eyes on the streets
Since then its use has grown exponentially. Today it is estimated by the British Security Industry Association that there is a CCTV camera for every 13 people in the UK.

But a 2008 review, funded by the Home Office, was equivocal about the effectiveness of the technology. In the report, which included research carried out on UK housing estates, the Campbell Collaboration found only ‘a modest but significant desirable effect on crime’. Although effective at tackling vehicle and car park crime, evidence of CCTV’s ability to reduce crime on housing estates was ‘mixed’.

Reviewing studies of CCTV’s impact on nine housing estates in the UK and US, three studies found a desirable effect on crime, two an undesirable effect, three uncertain and one no effect.

Yet CCTV remains ubiquitous - so have the problems identified in 2008 been solved? Are these systems really keeping residents safe - or are they a needless intrusion? In order to find out, Inside Housing visited one landlord - Incommunities - that nearly scrapped its CCTV system altogether.

The 21,000-home landlord inherited an unwieldy set of analogue cameras after taking over Bradford Council’s housing stock in 2003. This was far from a networked system of security cameras - it was more a rag-tag cluster of lenses. One camera was mounted 150 metres on top of a tower block, too far up to detect anything enforceable.

An ad hoc accumulation of software that couldn’t easily communicate across individual control bunkers epitomised this sprawling surveillance system that wasn’t particularly good at surveying anything.

By 2009, senior staff had lost confidence in the system. Its flaws were put into stark relief when, one weekday afternoon, chief executive Geraldine Howley left a meeting at Bradford’s city hall and was mugged.

‘My purse was found outside one of our blocks on Manchester Road by one of our staff,’ she says.

Although not a tenant, her assailant was spotted by a camera at an Incommunities block. ‘We checked the CCTV system and we could see [the purse] being dumped by the thief,’ she says. ‘But we only got a view of the back of him, it was very grainy too, so it couldn’t be used.’

The man was arrested later for a different crime.

A broader appeal
It’s not just Ms Howley who was keen on improving the CCTV system. In fact, it was Incommunities’ tenants who were instrumental in ensuring the landlord kept a system of CCTV. A consultation in 2009 found overwhelming support for its continued use. Incommunities’ director of legal services, Peter Newbould, says it was the strength of tenant feeling that convinced the landlord to reconsider the options for replacing the system.

Denise Kirby is an Incommunities tenant living in Shipley. She is full of praise for CCTV and is glad that a system has been kept.

‘I’ve been here for over 21 years and I think it’s a really good thing and makes the place feel a lot safer,’ she says. ‘We have our share of anti-social behaviour here, but it’s no worse than anywhere else. But it’s good to have the CCTV.’

One tenant from south London who does not wish to be named says she and other residents have long since lost faith in the cameras on her estate.

‘These cameras are supposed to be good enough to see what brand of jeans you are wearing. But my neighbour has CCTV trained on her front door and a burglar took £1,000 from her house,’ the tenant says. ‘We got [the landlord] to check the CCTV but the camera wasn’t working. I think landlords just use it to keep tabs on us, we pay for it but we’re not allowed to see the footage, are we?’

Standing in Incommunities’ state-of-the-art CCTV control room on the Ravenscliffe estate, it’s clear the new system is a vast improvement. We have passed through an airlock to enter the hi-tech control room. Inside, CCTV operators David, Mohammed, Asim and Paul work at individual desktops, four screens apiece. A system of eight-hour shifts keeps 24-hour watch, every day. Between them the operators monitor the landlord’s 240 high definition digital cameras - 25 per cent fewer cameras than were needed for the old system. The cameras range from one to five megapixels and combine static, pan, tilt and zoom capabilities and work in light or dark. The cost of individual cameras ranges from £300 to £3,500. In the control room the phone rings continuously.

‘It’s 3pm,’ says Richard Ayrton, Incommunities’ CCTV manager. ‘3pm until 7pm is the busiest time of day for us.’

From this room on the suburban outskirts of the city the operators get an instant multi-camera fix on any visitor pressing a door entry buzzer at tower blocks where CCTV is clustered. At this time of day, children are arriving home from school. On one screen a couple of lads are visiting a friend but can’t open the communal door. A CCTV operator notices and checks with the resident whose number has appeared on a screen alongside the CCTV footage. If necessary, in consultation with residents, the visitors are identified and allowed in. It all happens in real time, over a matter of seconds.

Monitoring crime
But there’s another side to the work being done in this room. Last year the monitor screens sprang to life, triggered by a man trying to buzz in to a flat. The duty operator that night quickly learned that the flat’s female occupant had good reason not to let this visitor in due to his history of domestic abuse.

Watching back, the footage is clear as day as the intruder smashes a window, and climbs into the block’s communal area. By now several cameras are trained on him and in the background the footage picks up a family with a young child cowering behind a stairwell wall.

The police arrested the intruder before he got to the flat. The footage is good enough to identify him and will be crucial to getting a conviction against him.

Incommunities’ director of legal services, Peter Newbould, says it is the quality of the footage that is the crucial leap forward with the system. ‘You take this footage to court and there’s no doubt that the person in the dock is the person on the film,’ he says. ‘Because it’s an HD camera we can take stills - in this case we were able to reproduce a full face. We’ve had it down to eye colour in some situations.’

He adds that the quality of the evidence has also lessened the need for witnesses - the quality of the footage in this case meant a statement was unnecessary.

Mr Newbould thinks this has been crucial in convincing judges to take action. The landlord recently won a case of racially motivated assault, which would have been impossible to prosecute in the absence of high-quality imagery shot at night.

Phil Morgan, a consultant and former executive director of tenant services at the Tenant Services Authority, says that resident engagement on ASB is important. On tenant-led service reviews he has worked on, CCTV has been seen to be beneficial alongside lighting and entrances.

‘Anti-social behaviour is less of a concern to tenants than it was 10 years ago,’ he says. ‘That doesn’t mean it isn’t important when it occurs - there should not be any complacency - but I suspect the combination of falling crime rates plus the attention that many social landlords have paid to ASB over the past 10 years has had an impact. Some of that impact will be due to CCTV.’

A positive impact
Mike Gelling, chair of the Tenants’ and Residents’ Organisations of England, lists the things he sees as important to CCTV’s continued use.

‘It still provides a sense of security,’ he says, ‘but if a crime or anything else does happen, I want to be sure not only that it’s on a camera but that the footage is good enough to use. It’s important that landlords speak to people. Tenants and residents must be included in the decision-making process about CCTV.

‘Finally, we need to be upfront about this technology, expectations need to be managed about what these systems can and can’t do and whether they are necessary.’

It is clear the technology has come a long way since 1987, but the extent to which CCTV has actually helped social landlords reduce crime and ASB overall is contestable.

Incommunities’ system is good enough to get convictions that were previously not possible. But its system is also sophisticated enough to enable its operators to act as ‘virtual concierges’, devoting as much time to assisting tenants as they do to monitoring their behaviour.

These advances mean modern CCTV is completely different to the types of systems developed in the 80s and 90s. Nearly 30 years on from its introduction, CCTV looks set to be focused on a housing estate near you for some time yet.