A Cardiff shopping centre has shown how the latest CCTV technology can cut crime and make life safer for shoppers.
St David's Shopping Centre, which has more than 60 shops including Debenhams, Bhs and Marks & Spencer, replaced its analogue VCRs with a digital video recording system from Vigilant Technology 18 months ago and has reduced crime as a result.
The movements of the 400,000 shoppers who visit St David's Shopping Centre each week are now recorded onto Vigilant's digital system, which provides half frame rate recording at 2CIF resolution on each and every camera, providing virtual real-time playback and 31-day RAID 5 hard disk storage of video images.
Brian Vaughan, technical services manager at St David's Shopping Centre, says the high quality video images produced by Vigilant's system has helped police to detect crime. "One of our external cameras captured a very serious assault that left a student in hospital for two months," recalls Brian. "The pictures of the attack captured by the system were so clear and detailed that they convinced the parents of the teenage lad who had carried out the attack to hand him in."
St David's Shopping Centre's CCTV system has also helped police disprove one woman's claim that she was raped outside the shopping centre. Crystal clear recorded images from the centre's cameras and the Vigilant system, showed the woman happily walking hand-in-hand with the man she had accused of raping her, both during and after the time the rape was alleged to have taken place.
"In just one month, the police have collected around 70 CD-ROMs of CCTV evidence from us because the image quality, playback tools and storage capacity provided by the Vigilant system is so good," says Brian. "All but two of our cameras are pan, tilt and zoom, but the Vigilant system enables us to zoom in even closer on images at the playback stage, enhancing our ability to identify offenders."
Compared to analogue, digital recording has made it easier for St David's Shopping Centre to provide the police with CCTV evidence. Brian explains: "With analogue recording, video footage could only be stored on one video tape, so if a police officer took the tape away to review, we wouldn't have a copy of the incident to review ourselves or to give to a second police officer. With digital recording, we can produce as many CD-ROMs of the same piece of footage as we want."
CCTV evidence has enabled St David's Shopping Centre to issue banning orders to persistent shoplifters, as well as helping police enforce Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. Brian says: "Shoplifters, in the main, have got the message and stay away from the centre."
St David's Shopping Centre has found the Vigilant recording system extremely reliable, but knows it can rely on swift support if maintenance is needed: "Our system has a modem on it so if there's a hiccup, Vigilant can dial in remotely and fix the problem straight away," says Brian.
The system was installed and is maintained by CDS Systems who are based in Pontypridd. Land Securities, which owns and manages St David's Shopping Centre, expects to work closely with Vigilant Technology for many years to come. "With CCTV, nothing stands still and the technology moves on at a very fast pace," says Brian. "I'm so impressed with Vigilant that if they were to develop new systems in the future, I'm sure we would look to introduce them here."