CCTV on the move

While fixed CCTV cameras have become an established part of ever more high streets, the use of mobile cameras to fight crime is less well established. However, there is no doubt thati installing mobile cameras in buses or trains can be a valuable edition to the security services’ tool-kit.

“Mobile CCTV is very much still a niche area of CCTV usage,” says Peter Fry, the Director of the CCTV user group. “However, with advances in digital recording technology, the technology is becoming more reliable, and this is really the key to this taking off.”

Caught on camera

A great example of mobile CCTV in action is found in the images of Muktar Said Ibrahim fleeing the number 26 bus after his botched attempts to detonate a nail bomb in London on July 21, 2005. Not only did the images of the would-be killer help with the initial investigation, but also with the prosecution of this dangerous terrorist.

It wasn’t just luck that Ibrahim was caught on camera. In probably the biggest deployment of mobile CCTV so far, the London Metropolitan Police had launched Operation Bus Tag in November 2004. This program has brought CCTV cameras to every single one of London’s fleet of 8000 buses.

While catching terrorists proves the value of the scheme, the operation also targets the kind of low-level anti-social behaviours, such as window etching and graffiti that can be hard to police using traditional methods, and can contribute disproportionately to creating a hostile environment for users.

The success of the cameras in fighting this low-level crime has been startling. In the first two-years of the program the camera footage has led to over 1200 arrests, with a 90 percent prosecution rate. “This is a significant achievement by BusTag and demonstrates that people who commit acts of vandalism in London buses will be caught with the help of CCTV pictures and then prosecuted,” says Chief Superintendent Michael Humphrey of the Transport Operational Command Unit.

Operation BusTag is very much a reactive program. A team of 70 analysts employed by the bus operating companies sift through the footage from the bus network. On finding anything suspicious, they then hand the footage to the police, who circulate the image around local forces to help apprehend and prosecute the suspect.

Technology developments

The key to the success of BusTag is the quality of the captured image. The better the quality of the picture, the better the chance of catching the criminal. Advances in digital recording mean that it is now possible for advanced cameras to control the image compressing in real-time. This means that any corruptions or missed frames can be compressed as they are recorded – avoiding the need to ‘clean’ the footage when the camera returns to base, and ensuring that images are of sufficient quality.

However, there are other technological developments that look set to have a huge impact in this area. For example, especially in big cities where wireless networks are well established, it is possible to stream the digital images in real-time back to a control room. This enables an immediate response from law enforcement officers, and the possibility of apprehending criminals while they are still committing a crime.

This kind of live-streaming is being used in Sydney, Australia, in the run-up to September’s Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation conference. High-definition cameras have been placed in potential terrorist targets including buses. This initiative is also notable as 200 of the new cameras include facial recognition technology.

This could be significant – with the quality and reliability of digital recording ever improving, the next step for the technology is to bring more analytics to the camera itself. ‘Smart’ cameras, that can recognise unusual patterns of behaviour, and hence trigger an alert, is an area that is still being developed. It’s clear that if the technology could be designed to be sufficiently reliable, and be light and portable enough to fit in a vehicle or other mobile application, this could automate a lot of the analysis of cameras, and might really bring mobile CCTV into mainstream use.

Ultimately, like fixed cameras, the potential uses of mobile CCTV are numerous. As Peter Key from the CCTV User Group argues, “with the technology becoming increasingly reliable and increasingly affordable the use of mobile CCTV is limited only by people’s imagination.” It might be the time that this technology area gets moving.