Surveillance Britain

It seems the CCTV chickens have come home to roost in surveillance obsessed Britain as a senior police officer has rubbished the impact of CCTV on crime prevention, a not too minor criticism in a country which is estimated to spend in excess of £1.1 Billon annually on installing and running CCTV systems making the inhabitants of Britain the most observed people in the world, to little practical effect it seems.

Billions of pounds spent on Britain’s 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras has not had a significant impact on crime, according to the senior police officer piloting a new database. Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said it was a “fiasco” that only 3 per cent of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV. Mr Neville, who heads the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) unit, told the Security Document World Conference that the use of CCTV images as evidence in court has been very poor.

“Billions of pounds have been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court,” he told the conference. “It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3 per cent of crimes were solved by CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.”

The aim of the Viido unit is to improve the way that CCTV footage is processed, turning it into a third forensic specialism alongside DNA analysis and fingerprinting. Britain has more CCTV cameras than any other country in Europe. But Mr Neville is reported in The Guardian as saying that more training was needed for officers who often avoided trawling through CCTV images “because it’s hard work”.


Viido had launched a series of initiatives including a new database of images that will be used to track and identify offenders using software developed for the advertising industry. This works by following distinctive brand logos on the clothing of unidentified suspects. By backtracking through images officers have often found earlier pictures of suspects where they have not been hiding their features. Mr Neville said that Viido would be publishing pictures of suspects in mugging, rape and robbery cases on the internet from next month and building a national CCTV database that will hold images of convicted criminals and unidentified suspects.

Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, said: “We would expect adequate safeguards to be put in place to ensure the images are used only for crime detection purposes, stored securely and that access to images is restricted to authorised individuals. We would have concerns if CCTV images of individuals going about their daily lives were retained.”

Fears that the UK would "sleep-walk into a surveillance society" have become a reality, the government's information commissioner has said. As always in Britain with Government projects delivery has been somewhat late but the “Big Brother” Society predicted by George Orwell in 1984 has certainly arrived now in 2008! Richard Thomas, who said he raised concerns two years ago, spoke after research found people's actions were increasingly being monitored. Researchers highlight "dataveillance", the use of credit card, mobile phone and loyalty card information, and CCTV. Monitoring of work rates, travel and telecommunications is also rising.

There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain - about one for every 14 people. But surveillance ranges from US security agencies monitoring telecommunications traffic passing through Britain, to key stroke information used to gauge work rates and GPS information tracking company vehicles, the Report on the Surveillance Society says. It predicts that by 2016 shoppers could be scanned as they enter stores, schools could bring in cards allowing parents to monitor what their children eat, and jobs may be refused to applicants who are seen as a health risk.

Produced by a group of academics called the Surveillance Studies Network, the report was presented to the 28th International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners' Conference in London, hosted by the Information Commissioner's Office. The office is an independent body established to promote access to official data and to protect personal details. The report's co-writer Dr David Murakami-Wood told BBC News that, compared to other industrialised Western states, the UK was "the most surveilled country". "We have more CCTV cameras and we have looser laws on privacy and data protection," he said. "We really do have a society which is premised both on state secrecy and the state not giving up its supposed right to keep information under control while, at the same time, wanting to know as much as it can about us."

The report coincides with the publication by the human rights group Privacy International of figures that suggest Britain is the worst Western democracy at protecting individual privacy. The two worst countries in the 36-nation survey are Malaysia and China, and Britain is one of the bottom five with "endemic surveillance". Mr Thomas called for a debate about the risks if information gathered is wrong or falls into the wrong hands. The Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) said there needed to be a balance between sharing information responsibly and respecting the citizen's rights. A spokesman said: "Massive social and technological advances have occurred in the last few decades and will continue in the years to come. "We must rise to the challenges and seize the opportunities it provides for individual citizens and society as a whole."



Graham Gerrard from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) said there were safeguards against the abuse of surveillance by officers. "The police use of surveillance is probably the most regulated of any group in society," he told the BBC. "Richard Thomas was particularly concerned about unseen, uncontrolled or excessive surveillance. Well, any of the police surveillance that is unseen is in fact controlled and has to be proportionate otherwise it would never get authorised”

Some of the myriad ways in which we can be watched are;

• 4.2m CCTV cameras
• 300 CCTV appearances a day
• Reg. plate recognition cameras
• Shop RFID tags
• Mobile phone triangulation
• Store loyalty cards
• Credit card transactions
• London Oyster cards
• Satellites
• Electoral roll
• NHS patient records
• Personal video recorders
• Phone-tapping
• Hidden cameras/bugs
• Worker call monitoring
• Worker clocking-in
• Mobile phone cameras
• Internet cookies
• Keystroke programmes

The great problem with surveillance is the contrast between the compulsive behaviour of those promoting and using it and the Public concern that sooner or later it will be abused and it is a poor substitute for on the ground policing by, whisper it, human police. Indeed as the CCTV craze has taken hold in Britain “real” police have largely disappeared from the streets of the UK. Instead you are more likely to see what are deprecatingly called “Plastic PCs”, Police Community Support Officers who don’t have the same training, pay or powers. Even when you do ring the Police your chances are now slim that you’ll actually meet a Police Officer. You will be put through to a centralised call centre where civilian staff will “prioritise” your call. Unless you become a “CAT A”, an emergency blue light response, as the control staff are incentivised to ditch as many calls as possible, your chances of saying "Hello Officer!" are slim. Mobile phone theft? I’ll take your details and give you a reference to claim from your insurance company. Car window broken? Unless you actually saw it happen you can’t assume it is a crime. And my favourite is that the Metropolitan Police don’t respond to burglaries unless the thief is still on the premises!

In fact only 3% of crimes are solved using CCTV and in many cases where it is available it is unusable or unfit for evidence because there are no national standards. Indeed often the Police simply do not have time to go through the amount of material available so it is simply not examined. So as a cynical public and police officers alike have pointed out CCTV may document crime but it rarely seems to prevent it. The public don’t want their mugging to be captured on high quality CCTV, they would much prefer if it didn’t happen in the first place!


The other issue is the widespread abuse of personal data and failure to comply with the Data Protection Act. Every CCTV camera trained on a public place should state in a prominent place on a notice specified in the Act why the images are being recorded, who is responsible and how they are to be contacted. It is little known that you can apply for this Data from the Data Controller of the company concerned as you can for any other data under the Data Protection act (DPA). But the law is widely flouted and the enforcement is totally ineffectual. Take one case of many I could give, the achingly hip St. Martin’s Lane Hotel in the Central London street of the same name, so hip it doesn’t even have a sign and the cheapest room is £230 a night. It describes itself thus;

“From its dazzling location at the hub of Covent Garden, West End theatres and Trafalgar Square, St Martins Lane is a dramatic and daring reinvention of the urban resort. Smart, witty and sophisticated, Philippe Starck’s design is a brilliant collision of influences - from the modern to the baroque - that suffuses the hotel with energy, vitality and magic.”

Well one influence it has little danger of colliding with is the DPA, for it has no less than 8 CCTV cameras trained on the busy public streets around the hotel but not a single notice as required under the DPA. Obviously too “Smart, witty and sophisticated” to comply with the law of the land.

Perhaps given the failure of CCTV to solve crime, the huge waste of resources in surveillance, the lack of control of the increasing much resented surveillance in our lives which is changing the very nature of society and the total failure to ensure effective data controls it is time to roll back “Big Brother” and get the police out of their strategy and liaison meetings and fighting something as boring as crime in real time instead of investing in more toys for the boys?

“It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.”

George Orwell. 1984.

A Policeman's Lot?

Shy Andy

If you have the misfortune to be arrested by the police in England you will be read the following statement:

“You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."

The implication is clear, that an innocent person wants to proclaim their innocence and speak in their own defence. Indeed under the same Act (Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994) a judge in their charge to a jury may instruct them to draw an unfavourable inference from a defendant’s refusal to testify or their refusal to make a statement to the police.

Consider then the contrast in the case of Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman of Scotland Yard responsible for the Metropolitan Police’s unit in charge of the fight against terror, who has decided to retire immediately as the £180,000-a-year post, thereby avoiding a disciplinary inquiry or other action in relation to a number of matters. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) examined Mr Hayman's conduct after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station and later accused the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner of misleading colleagues and the public. Mr Hayman, who has spearheaded the fight against Islamic extremism since 2005, has also been questioned over allegedly “inflated” expenses claims and trips abroad with Sergeant Heidi Tubby, his staff officer.

His decision to step down is yet another blow for Sir Ian Blair who recruited Mr Hayman after taking over as Metropolitan Police Commissioner in February 2005. Mr Hayman's former colleagues have rallied to his support, claiming he had been the victim of a 'dirty tricks campaign' at Scotland Yard.

This is where the Yardies live - A Male Gang obsessed with guns and "Respect"

Channel 4 News claimed Mr Hayman was in very close contact with the complaints commission official, who worked for the watchdog's communications department. The pair's exchanges came when the commission was drafting its report into how the Met handled the aftermath of the shooting of Mr de Menezes in South London in July 2005. Channel 4 alleged the “communications risked compromising the integrity and authority of the IPCC inquiry”. The female official at the centre of a row which led the Met's anti-terror chief to quit is named today as 36-year-old Nicki Redmond. She received hundreds of calls and texts from Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman while on the staff of the Independent Police Complaints Commission investigating the Stockwell shooting. After leaving the commission, Ms Redmond was at the centre of a probe into alleged "inappropriate contact". Ms Redmond worked for the Independent Police Complaints Commission while it was compiling its damning report into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station.


Andy Hayman with "friend" Nikki Redmond

The UK's former top anti-terror officer is to be given "advice" after breaking the police code of conduct following the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting. A report said Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman "misled" the public. Now the Independent Police Complaints Commission has ruled he should not face disciplinary proceedings but should be advised about future conduct.

In a statement, the IPCC said: "On 6 November, the MPA recommended that Mr Hayman receive advice because he had broken Code 5 of the Police Code of Conduct that says officers should be conscientious and diligent in the performance of their duties.

"After taking legal advice, the three IPCC Commissioners, who oversaw the investigation, have decided to accept the MPA's recommendation." The IPCC also said it would pursue the MPA's recommendation that it undertake an "in depth" review of the lessons to be learnt from Mr de Menezes's death.

Mr Hayman, a 48-year-old married father of two, has been caught up in two internal investigations this year. The first was sparked after complaints that information about a series of anti-terror raids in Birmingham last February was leaked to the media in advance. Mr Hayman's telephone records for the months before and after the raids were scrutinised and he was cleared of any blame. Investigators did, however, find details of the hundreds of “unexplained” calls between Mr Hayman and the complaints commission official. She has now left the police watchdog and works for the Association of Chief Police Officers.

In a separate inquiry, Yard auditors raised concerns over the £15,000 spent by Mr Hayman on drinks, restaurants, hotels and foreign travel. He strenuously denied the expenses allegations and vowed to clear his name when details of the financial probe emerged last month. Mr Hayman vigorously rejected the claims but, after a reported fiery meeting with Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair decided to take early retirement. He issued a statement saying the “unfounded allegations” had taken their toll. The former Norfolk chief constable will spend the next four months on paid leave before officially retiring in April. By then he will have served 30 years in the police and be entitled to a full pension.

In a statement, Mr Hayman said the time was right to leave the high-profile job after a string of hurtful accusations. “This role requires total commitment in both time and effort and has a considerable impact on your personal life, your family and friends,” he added.


Sgt Heidi Tubby

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said: 'Andy Hayman has been at the forefront of the police's work to protect our country from the terrorist threat. “I am very grateful for his immense contribution to counterterrorism and to British policing.” Mr Hayman was awarded a CBE last year for his outstanding work after the London bombings of July 2005 and for his role in rounding up the failed July 21 gang. He is said to have impressed Tony Blair and leading Government figures with his calm demeanour and factual briefings to the Cobra emergency security committee that month.

Last year he made a humiliating apology to two brothers arrested and later released after a high-profile anti-terror raid on their house in Forest Gate, East London. One of the men was shot during the operation which involved a search for a “chemical device”. No such device was found.

In December last year, Hayman was found to have been in command of an "unlawful" investigation into one of his own colleagues, Ali Dizaei, who was then a Met police superintendent. Hayman was in overall command of an operation that included tapping Dizaei's phones, something the investigatory powers tribunal declared unlawful. The investigation took four years and cost £4m, but ended with Dizaei's acquittal on corruption charges at the Old Bailey. The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair admitting it had caused "considerable damage" to relations between the force and its black officers.


Ali Dizaei

He was instrumental in government attempts to extend the period for which terror suspects can be held without charge to 90 days. MPs were unconvinced by the proposal, and Tony Blair's government suffered its first Commons defeat over the issue in November 2005.

So who is this shrinking violet who is resigning because he finds the “unfounded accusations” hurtful. Well as the former Chief Constable of Norfolk and Head of the Anti-Terrorist squad he probably doesn’t meet the normal profile of a sensitive soul. Mr Hayman joined Essex Police in 1978 where he served as a uniformed officer and in the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). In November 1998 Mr Hayman was appointed Commander in the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and given responsibility for drugs, crime and complaints investigations. In this role he commanded Operation Trident an investigation into drug-related murders in the capital. In September 1999 he was appointed Director of the Anti-Corruption and Complaints Investigation Department, which became the Directorate of Professional Standards, responsible for discipline and anti-corruption.

From April 2001 to December 2002 he was Deputy Assistant Commissioner, retaining responsibility for professional standards and assuming extra responsibilities as deputy to the Deputy Commissioner.

So as a former Chief Constable, Commissioner responsible for discipline and anti-corruption and head of the anti – terrorist squad making life and death decisions (not necessarily a metaphor) why has he suddenly become bashful, sensitive and upset? The assumption of the Law in England is that innocence seeks to proclaim itself and be heard but Andy Hayman has made a decision to resign, to not square up to the allegations made and to not answer them. Is this the behaviour and example expected from a senior police office honoured with a CBE and the Queen’s Police Medal, paid generously over 30 years from the public purse and expected to be held accountable to that same public for his actions.

Indeed is this the same silence which would draw an “unfavourable inference” if you or I were being questioned by Andy Hayman’s erstwhile colleagues or appeared in court on the basis of evidence presented by them?

The Death of Jean Charles de Menezes

Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by Metropolitan Police firearms officers at Stockwell Tube station, London, on July 22nd. 2005. Bizarrely the Met(as the Metropolitan Police or Scotland Yard are commonly known) is being prosecuted under English Law not for Murder or Manslaughter but under Health and Safety legislation for failing to protect the health of Jean Charles de Menezes and members of the public who were exposed to danger in the operation. Indeed.

The details revealed so far in court are of a 27 year old electrician peacefully going to work unaware he was being trailed, not being intercepted as a possible suspect, getting on and off two buses, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a light jacket with no baggage or possibility of concealing anything on his person, going routinely through station barriers and pausing to pick up a free newspaper, taking his seat on a tube train.

There he was held without challenge by a police officer who immobilised him by holding his arms around him in a vice like grip whilst his two colleagues fired 7 special "124 grain" dum-dum style bullets into his head at point blank range. The details of this killing have appalled and dismayed the public in equal measure and common sense would suggest these feelings will not be addressed by a prosecution under "Health and Safety" legislation - this being somewhat beyond satire. I think we can take it as read that if you kill somebody wrongly you have not protected their "Health and Safety."

Scotland Yard have real issues to answer about the apparent ineptness of the operation and about the large amount of uncorrected disinformation disseminated afterwards from the Commissioner downwards that this innocent persons' killing was "related to the ongoing terrorist situation", that he behaved suspiciously, ran away from officers, vaulted over ticket barriers and was wearing "bulky clothing". As none of this was true, where did it come from?

Hindsight is a great teacher, it is always a pity we don't have it beforehand, but there is another side to this sad story. Fifteen days previously on the 7th July 2005 4 suicide bombers had detonated 3 bombs on the Tube and one on a London bus. They killed 52 people (and themselves) in the biggest mass murder in peacetime Britain. The roll call of the dead is heart rending encompassing a typical cross section of Londoner's going about their day, young and old from every continent, colour and religious persuasion including a 19 year old Muslim girl on the threshold of her life. Of the 4 "brave" martyrs one was a 19 year old Jamaican Muslim convert who lived near me in Aylesbury and who took 26 lives on a Piccadilly Line train between Russell Square and King's Cross. What did a 19 year old know about life and what sort of crypto fascism justifies this cruel obscenity towards people you do not know but look in the eye before killing and maiming them? Maimed indeed for as well as the dead there were over 300 injured, some who lost limbs and eyes and some who will never live independent lives again.

I was in London that day and for a number of days afterwards spent afternoons and evenings helping people cope with the transport disruption. Two things were palpable. one was the great determination that London would not be brought to its knees by what happened, there was the quiet unseen courage of the Tube and Bus drivers who climbed into cabs at dawn the next morning and in their own way said "let's Roll!". The sense of determination was shared by the public who displayed stoic courage by insisting on going about their everyday business and not being terrorised even if it meant walking halfway across London to work.

Nerves were of course there under the surface but they had recovered somewhat when exactly 2 weeks later on the 21st July 2005 there was almost a carbon copy attempt of 4 suicide bomb attacks on the transport system in London by fanatics equally determined to destroy their fellow unknown human beings. This second attempt nearly succeeded and only failed because they had made a small error in the formulation of the homemade but deadly explosives they attempted to detonate. This second attempt was a great shock to the system, to the morale of Londoner's and no doubt to the security services who felt they had bottomed out all the leads and had stabilised the situation.

Now along with all of London they were looking into the abyss and not knowing what they were looking at or where the next threat would come from. What is happening and how many more are out there? - was the general public feeling. It was Jean Charles de Menezes great misfortune that he lived in a block of flats which was also the address of Hussain Osman, one of the failed suicide bombers from the day before and he was not entirely dissimilar in appearance given the limited identification information the police had to go on.

No doubt these court proceedings and further inevitable investigations will draw their own conclusions and I'm not attempting to anticipate them, but I make two observations of my own.

One is that society as a whole is not pacifist. We expect that the welfare of all is protected and logically that means we assent to people killing on our behalf. So we agree an Army is maintained and we expect it to kill and its troops to accept the possibility they will also be killed in combat. If an embassy is besieged, if a plane is hijacked or if a deranged gunman walks down the street killing at will we expect somebody to deal with the threat on our behalf. And if a suicide bomber is apprehended before he can blow us up we expect they will be killed. On the morning of the 22nd July 2005, the Met, a civilian police force had called in all the help it could get from the Defence and Security services and was trying to cover an impossible number of bases not knowing where the next threat was or where it would come from. Wherever fault lays in this sorry story it does lay with the three armed officers acting under orders who entered a Tube train to stop what they thought was Hussain Osman detonating a bomb.

The second point is who those of us who live and work in London felt that morning. Shamefully, I can remember my reaction was "Good on them, they got one!" and I can tell you in feeling that I was in a majority of, well, everybody. For at that stage, below the surface, there was a palpable sense of fear about town. And that is the point of the sheer obscenity and ruthless cruelty the suicide bomber. It desensitises all of us and for the sake of our protection makes us accept in our heart that which we would not normally accept in our head.

That desensitivity is something we all must fight against because otherwise the bomber has won and that must and will never happen. In this case it means we must, however difficult it may seem, try to do two things. Respect the memory of Jean Charles de Menezes and the grief of his family and respect the courage of the Police Officers who, out of a profound sense of public duty, did the unthinkable on all our behalves.