It has long been recognised that one of the most effective ways of fighting crime, anti-social behaviour and terrorism is through public vigilance.
There are only 158 cameras in Cambridge, Ely and Soham but potentially there are something in the region of 170,000 pairs of eyes living, working and playing in these areas — who can see a lot more than the police or CCTV cameras ever can.
The CCTV system has worked hard to establish partnership working with several organisations but now we must try and establish joint working with potentially one of the most important partners of all — the public.
It is not operationally practical to give out the CCTV Control Room telephone number but the City Council feels that it is important that people have some means of contacting CCTV when they see something going on which they believe is wrong. So from the 1st June 2006 CCTV will introduce a pilot texting service for the public to contact the CCTV Control Room direct.
This is we believe a new concept for CCTV which has not been tried anywhere else and although the initial idea came from Cambridge City Council’s CCTV department, it could not have come to fruition without the financial support of the Council’s Reception and Office Services Manager and the council's IT support team from SERCO.
The first thing that must be stressed when considering sending a text is that:
- all crimes committed in Cambridge, Ely and Soham must be reported to the Police first by dialling 999 for serious incidents and 0845-4564564 in all other cases.
- Then the public can contact the CCTV Control Room by texting 62288 (the last four digits spells 'CCTV' on your textpad) and sending their message.
Senders should remember that:
- CCTV can only deal with incidents within the cameras’ arcs of observation
- Several locations have the same name — for example both Cambridge and Ely have Market Squares
- Senders must text the name of the city or town
- So the message should contain the location and type of the incident e.g. 'Market Sq, Cambridge. Fight'
- The text message will then appear on a screen in front of the CCTV Operators and the caller will receive an acknowledgement that the message has been received.
- The CCTV Operator will then read the message and prioritise it.
- Please note that an incident involving for example an assault will take a higher priority than a shoplifter.
- Once the message has been checked and prioritised the CCTV Operator will use the cameras to locate the incident.
- Once the incident has been located, the CCTV Operator will start recording it and then call the Police Control Room and show the images to the Police who will then decide how to deal with the incident.
