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Salford's CCTV tech plans

Posted by Editor on 2nd September 2010 at 11:01 AM
Salford's CCTV tech plans
Salford City Council will bring information together from all the CCTV cameras in Salford and merge it with a property database in an attempt to tackle crime in the city.

Salford Council recently rolled out hi-tech colour CCTV across the city in a contract worth nearly two million pounds.

The National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) database is a list of addresses in the UK "that provides unique identification of land and property" according to its website.

It is also apparently an exhaustive list that covers over 200 million rows of street data.

One of its functions is to provide 'Street BLPU' records where anti-social behaviour or road traffic accidents might converge.

This means that national data will help pinpoint 'hotspots' for crime, which the Council can corroborate with CCTV evidence

The news, from Computing.co.uk, shows the mixing and merging of Council data with national databases in an attempt to tackle crime in the area.

Local Government Information House (LGIH) set-up the project for Salford Council. It's an organisation that focuses on geographical information-related projects.

Says the article: "The project saw the council collate information on CCTVs owned by private firms, individuals, nightclubs and hotels for example, via an online form requesting information. Data was only collected from owners of cameras holding recorded information for 72 hours or more. The aim was to tackle crime using recorded footage of incidents.

The scheme gave each camera a unique reference number and mapped it to the NLPG, a giant address database that stores information about all properties and land paths in the UK. Each reference number was linked to contact details of the CCTV owner.

Paul Coward, Corporate GIS Consultant at Salford City Council, said: “We needed a map-based solution with an incident pinpointing tool that enabled us to locate an incident quicky, as well as identify possible high quality CCTV coverage and the means to request coverage from any camera owner.”

Report as offensive or innapropriate Comment by Guest  2nd September 2010
Big Brother is definitely watching you!

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