13 November - Council first. Residents second
Fifteen years ago Bexley Council
made
a deal with Siemens to equip the borough with a state of the art CCTV
system. I assumed it was digital but recent comments from the Council have
spoken of replacing an analogue system. Whether it was digital or whether the
Council was sold an analogue pup is largely immaterial now. Fifteen years of
CCTV development will have left either seriously outdated.
The grand idea had been that Siemens would install a system so advanced that it could
sell the facilities and the data collected to other local boroughs and
Bexley would profit from it. None of that ever happened of course and the
Council lost out on its additional investment. Five years later it
stopped monitoring CCTV to save £225,000 and lost the ability to ‘chaseְ’ criminals in real time.
So a disaster all round. What else would one expect from a Council bamboozled by technology?
Apart from being digital what else will a new CCTV system provide? More cameras
perhaps? Bexley Council is not sure of the exact numbers but on the face of it
there will be far fewer cameras. Precise numbers are difficult because some of the old cameras no longer work. Are the
replacements extra cameras or not?
One figure is clear, there will be four mobile cameras
but fixed
street cameras less so. They will reduce from just over 100 to about 70.
The big change is in car parks which used to have about 113 cameras and their
number will go down to just three. The logic of the massive reduction is that in the
past the cameras have focused on pay-and-display cash
machines and now that most car parking is cashless they are not needed.
And there you have Bexley Council in a nutshell. Their priority is looking after
themselves and not as you might have imagined, the residents and their cars.
Note: Information from a Freedome of Information request by @tonyofsidcup.