Helping Prevent, Deter, and Detect Crime

When Islington Council merged and upgraded separate surveillance systems, the CCTV team could monitor six times as many cameras as before from the central control centre, providing a better picture of crime and anti-social behaviour across the borough. This move is already positively impacting community safety.

Islington is home to around 215,000 people, making it the highest-density local authority anywhere in the UK. Encompassing areas of extreme diversity in terms of affluence, it is the location of one of the UK’s busiest football grounds – The Emirates Stadium. The borough also features more licensed premises per square mile than anywhere else in the UK – 13,000 in total, more than a third of which are allowed to sell alcohol 24 hours a day.

Keeping the public safe, preventing crime and anti-social behaviour, and investigating incidents – particularly in areas affected by issues relating to gangs, drugs, and alcohol – is a round-the-clock job for the borough’s award-winning surveillance team.

Existing capabilities

Before moving to the new control centre location, operators could view, control, and record footage from 165 public space cameras linked by 17km of fibre optic backbone cable using Synectics Synergy security and surveillance solution.

Functionality included live incident tracking, prioritised supervisor access, evidence locker management, and the ‘Follow Me’ feature, which allowed live footage to be routed to the police. Combined, these helped the CCTV team detect more incidents, work closely with the police, and produce high-quality evidential footage to secure pre-trial guilty pleas.

However, cameras monitoring the council’s housing estates had been operating on a different system, sometimes making tracking incidents borough-wide difficult.

Scaled-up surveillance simplified

The decision to move the control centre and integrate with other critical public protection teams, including the Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB) units, licensing officers, and the emergency planning unit, provided the ideal opportunity to consider streamlining separate CCTV systems and bringing them all under one roof.

Doing so required connecting more than 800 cameras from Islington’s housing estate areas – while ensuring each estate retained localised access and control. This process was simple thanks to Steve Hatton, Director of Cognetix and the security consultant behind the entire project, Tyco’s support as the selected surveillance integrator, and Synergy’s technical capabilities.

Operators at the control centre can now access and collate data from over 1,000 cameras within a single environment, including 14 3G mobile cameras deployed to ‘hot spot’ areas – locations often identified through incident type and rate analysis facilitated by the solution’s audit trail functionality.

Mr Tuckey said: “Steve Hatton, our Cognetix consultant, developed a detailed specification to best suit our needs. He and Tyco ensured the upgrade went very smoothly – with no downtime – and the user-friendly, intuitive nature of Synergy meant the team could quickly adapt to a vastly extended monitoring remit.

"Just two weeks after one of the estates went live on the new system, one of our operators was able to use around 80 cameras to help police track and arrest a suspected double murderer and arsonist, who was subsequently convicted. Our team had previously been unfamiliar with this location, which makes the achievement even more impressive. That staff member was named CCTV Operator of the Year by London’s Metropolitan Police.”

Integration that saves time and helps solve crime

Integrating the separate CCTV systems has had a noticeable impact. According to Mr Tuckey, police requests for footage review, incident tracking, and evidential support have increased significantly because “capabilities have improved so dramatically.” On average, around 1,500 incidents are dealt with each quarter, and in the last year alone, the team’s investigations helped police solve five murder cases.

Mr Tuckey continued: “One of the most important aspects of the upgraded solution is that it has enabled us to integrate beneficial technologies on a single unified platform – using Synergy to collate and manage data from Tyco surveillance equipment and Vigilant recording is incredibly helpful to operational efficiency.

“As well as making it easier for us to help the police solve crimes, integrations such as these also help us prevent incidents from escalating as we can detect potential issues and work with the police accordingly quickly.”

The value of audit trails and reports

Significantly, the monitoring and reviewing efficiencies have not come at the expense of procedural accuracy for Islington.

“Since the upgrade, we can monitor and review more cameras than ever before, faster than ever before, while being confident that every action is logged automatically to generate a clear and transparent audit trail. In addition to aiding evidential procedures, this is also a vital tool for training and ultimately demonstrating the valuable service we provide for the borough,” Mr Tuckey added.

Using Synergy, the Islington CCTV team can also deliver detailed reports for incident types, trends, and locations. These reports can then be fed back to the police and local management to aid resource planning, e.g., for mobile camera placement or officer deployment.

“Our surveillance system is flexible, reliable, robust, and, above all, it is helpful," concluded Mr Tuckey.