Sandwell Council’s CCTV and Concierge Service – an introduction

Sandwell Councils CCTV control room has been fully operational 24 hours a day, 365 days a year since opening in 2010. The CCTV Control Room has a compliment of 24 operators working round the clock to ensure our services are delivered 24hrs a day, every day. There are 2 supervisors working a bespoke shift pattern complimenting other departments, partner agencies and leading the Control Room operations outside of regular business hours. Management of the CCTV and Concierge service is in the form of a CCTV Operations manager who is responsible for the overall running of the service. We monitor over 460 cameras across the borough – mainly covering our high-rise blocks of flats with half of our 54 blocks currently being covered. We cover two of our town centres - West Bromwich and Wednesbury and we also cover Friar Park, Yew Tree and Princes End. We also monitor the council’s deployable cameras that are deployed across the borough to help reduce ASB or crime in identified hotspots.

On average, we monitor and report over 5000 incidents of crime/ASB and tenancy breaches a year. Around 60% of these were proactively captured by our CCTV operators with the remaining 40% being reported to us. As a direct response to the incidents we see we can issue warnings via PA systems or intercoms, we can contact the police to respond and deal with an issue or we can contact other emergency services such as the ambulance or fire brigade. Our operators resolve around a third incidents at the time they are reported to the control room by carrying out some sort of action at the time of receiving a report. We will also report issues to other colleagues and departments such as our housing staff, ASB teams, repairs teams, tenancy fraud teams and the councils Environmental Protection Officers for action at a later date. Information is passed on to other colleagues and departments for information and intelligence so they can make full use of the information that is gathered within the control room.

We work in partnership with the police, wardens, ASB officers, housing officers, taxi licencing, environmental health and other teams such as our counter fraud teams and Environmental Protection team. On the back of the information we provide we have seen arrests and convictions, tenancy warnings have been issued, ASB enforcement action has been taken, advice given etc. We have also helped put council properties back into proper use after they have been used fraudulently. We have witnessed and reported domestic abuse and worked with teams to safeguard the victims. We have monitored and reported incidents of vandalism, vehicle nuisance, drugs, alcohol related issues, violence, misuse of communal areas in high rise blocks, litter and fly-tipping, animal nuisance and noise. At the more serious end we have monitored and passed information to the police in relation to crimes such as assault, weapons offences, robbery, murder, drug dealing, sexual assault, firearms offences, burglary to name a few.

The control room also offers intercom/concierge services to over 2000 of our high-rise tenants. Intercoms located on the front door panel of blocks allow us to control access whilst handsets in the tenant’s flats allows them to have 24-hour contact with us to report a range of issues. We can also contact tenants to issue warnings about their behaviour and on other occasions just to reassure that we have dealt with an issue for them We have the facility to put blocks on ‘control’ so after a certain time all calls will be re-routed through to us so nuisance callers can’t disturb our tenants. We have also taken total control of tenants calls when they have been identified as vulnerable and need additional help in terms of limiting calls to them. Domestic abuse victims being one example of this. We will make/receive around 100’000 intercom calls from our control room each year The CCTV and Concierge department is also responsible for the physical security of all of our high rise and low-rise blocks, this means we look after the maintenance and fob management of our secure door entry systems covering approximately 3500 properties and our services include maintenance and servicing of door entry systems

In short, we deliver a proactive service that is joined up with other departments.

Every day and night all year round our control room operators are here monitoring our cameras and dealing with our intercom calls – we never shut, we are always

available to our customers.

You can contact us if you have any further questions on 0121 569 5069

More information, including our local code of practice and an outcome summary can be found on the SMBC website at:

http://www.sandwell.gov.uk/info/200223/housing/2536/cctv_in_sandwell