Local Digital Policing – CCTV
Cheshire Town Centre CCTV Discovery
Customer: Cheshire Constabulary
CLIENT BRIEF
Cheshire Constabulary wanted to better understand what they could achieve by integrating live and recorded CCTV from 5 unitary control rooms, 3 custody suites and one other police site in Cheshire, into their new control room front system. They had identified aspirational benefits of a reduction in travel to collect CCTV recordings, and ease of use.
WHAT WE DID
Sarax were commissioned to carry out an initial discovery phase into the ‘art of the possible’, providing technical options with comparative costs, along with associated risks.
HOW WE DID IT
Sarax carried out structured interviews with the 2 unitary authorities involved and visited their 5 control rooms.
We visited the police control room project team and the contractor to discuss the project, the technical integration opportunities, the commercial arrangements around what was already being delivered, and the proposed processes for live and recorded CCTV.
A costed options paper was presented to Cheshire Constabulary.
THE WORKS
Sarax presented 5 options, each with comparative costs, advantages and disadvantages, benefits, risks, and impact assessments:
- As is/null option – continuing to access CCTV as previous
- Provision of a software platform with individual API integrations for the incoming CCTV and a single API interfacing to the control room system
- Provision of a software platform with hardware integrating the incoming video and a single API to the control room system
- Integration of existing web players directly into the control room front end
- Replace the existing police CCTV integration system and connect directly with the control room front end.
The commercial arrangements in place and the existing risk profile, and risk appetite of the project meant that any of the active solutions proposed would have altered the risk, cost, and programme profiles.
BENEFITS
- The null option emerged as the most attractive. Without our discovery work, Cheshire Constabulary would have incurred nugatory cost, additional risk and programme delay with a likely outcome of limited functionality that required process changes
- Identification of ongoing council upgrades where design decisions could be influenced to the benefit of the police
- Sarax were able to identify that there was an option to improve camera access with one of the unitary authorities with a system that had been bought but never properly implemented. This would allow Cheshire Constabulary to make remote downloads thus meeting one of their original aspirational benefits.
VALUE ADD
- By using our police and technical domain expertise, we were able to present a concise report, including the impacting process and commercial factors, enabling the client to quickly make an informed decision
- We were able to go beyond the remit to identify easy wins for the client.
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