Step inside the Gold Coast City Council’s secret crime-fighting CCTV war room
YOU wouldn’t notice if you walked past the door but it’s police and council’s secret crime-fighting weapon.
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YOU wouldn’t know it was there even if you walked right past the front door.
But go through this door, up a few stairs and through another innocuous-looking door and there it is – a solid brick wall carpeted in 55-inch screens with live feeds from CCTV safety cameras that are dotted around the city’s hotspots.
Footage shows people going about their business on city streets, parks and busy corners in Coolangatta, Surfers Paradise and Broadbeach to name just a few suburbs under constant surveillance.
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One man in a white security shirt mans a desk in front of the wall of TVs, occasionally jotting down notes in a logbook as he notices things of interest. At times he answers the phone when police call with queries about sites of interest – at other times he calls them.
This is the nerve centre of the Gold Coast City Council’s 199-strong safety camera network which covers the length of the Coast from Southport to Coolangatta.
And council are secretive about the location of the CCTV nerve centre, with good reason: “We may seem paranoid,” council safety camera network coordinator Guy Russell says, “but the reason is previously we have had incidents where bikies and bouncers have confronted our guards coming off shift.
“That is going back seven or eight years ago but it made us conscious of the need for staff safety. And as we get more security conscious heading towards the 2018 Commonwealth Games, the fewer who know about it, the better.”
Guy pulls up some historic footage (anything too recent breaches rules) to demonstrate just how effective it can be to capture criminals in the act.
A scene from around 4am in Surfers Paradise beams up on a monitor, showing an intoxicated member of the public asleep on a park bench.
A young man is nervously lingering, shuffling back and forth and pretending to pick up rubbish and put it inside a nearby rubbish bin. The council staffer monitoring the wall of screens at the time had noticed this and immediately alerted police to the location.
On the edge of the TV screen frame, people can be seen walking by from time to time.
The loitering young man waits until he’s alone with the intoxicated bench sitter and bang – he reaches into the man’s pocket, steals his phone and sprints off.
He runs for about 50 metres not realising his every move is being captured on CCTV and is being watched from within this room.
About 15 seconds later he rejoins some acquaintances and stops running. Meanwhile, the person monitoring the footage has alerted police to the suspect’s description and where they are – and within a minute, beat cops are on the scene and arrest him.
“They know exactly which boy they want,” Guy tells Coast Weekend as he admiringly watches the police cuff the youngster.
Guys nods his head and adds: “No discussion, no debate.”
“He will probably be going ‘I didn’t do it, wasn’t me’. The police will just play the footage back to him at the station and away you go.”
That was footage from 2012 – and criminals take note: it’s much better and more comprehensive now.
Recently the council has started updating its cameras with more than 20 now being High Definition – and counting.
The High Definition camera upgrade continues every time an older camera is retired as part of a renewal process.
It’s not making a huge difference for the purposes of live monitoring but it’s a different story when reviewing footage later.
Guy tells Coast Weekend: “It’s significantly better.
“You don’t notice it so much in live viewing but in the recording it’s providing real benefits. You can digitally zoom in for much greater detail.”
Zooming in on the old analogue camera footage tended to result in images pixelating fairly quickly and not being as reliable when standing up as evidence in a court.
But other than that, you’d have to try pretty hard to find a police officer to say a bad word about the Gold Coast council CCTV system.
From police on the beat to Gold Coast top cop Des Lacy, there is universal praise for how helpful the council funded and maintained system is – and what it prevents.
That includes offences that might just be a dark thought in someone’s mind.
Inspector Bruce Kuhn, the police liaison to the council, says he has seen the camera network act as deterrent firsthand.
“A girl was sitting on a park bench, some guys were hanging around, tried to talk to her and then they came back.
Bruce: “You get someone in the police cruiser to pull up and they guys walk off.”
Senior Sergeant Jim Munckton, the officer in charge of Surfers Paradise, says police are incredibly grateful that the council maintain the camera network and monitor live footage.
“The benefit of this and the money council puts in is very significant and we are fortunate to be recipients of the information they provide,” Jim tells Coast Weekend.
On top of live updates and intelligence about potential unfolding situations, the police get about 650 DVDs a year of recorded footage from the CCTV nerve centre for use in investigations and court proceedings.
The constant improvements to the camera network, with installation of High Definition cameras plus an ongoing increase in the number of cameras in the city – the light rail system has its own separate network of hundreds at the tram stops and in carriages – is coalescing with an increasingly technology savvy police force.
Last year, the State Government had more than 2500 iPads distributed to police, with the highest concentration –between 400 and 500 – going to Gold Coast officers.
One of the main iPad uses for police on the street is for a police application called QLite which allows officers to check online the background of a person, their licence and their vehicle. Without the iPad, the details would need to be radioed through to the station where it is checked and the information is radioed back.
The instant roadside iPad check is saving police lots of money and time.
A new level of cooperation between council and the police is also being discussed – that revolves around the potential for streaming live footage of brewing or unfolding incidents directly to a police officer’s mobile phone or iPad device.
The council revealed in the Bulletin yesterday that it is exploring technical and legal aspects of streaming live video to officers who are patrolling.
“But,” Gold Coast mayor Tom Tate emphasises, “it is extremely early days.”
For top cop Des, streaming live CCTV footage directly to his officers on the beat isn’t an idea he’s 100 per cent sold on as yet.
“Situational awareness is one of the most important tools for any officer. It means they can see what’s around them and visualise and feel what’s happening.
“We don’t want police standing around on the streets looking at their iPad screens because they would tend to lose that situational awareness,” Des says.
“But if we can somehow enhance an officer’s situational awareness by the stream, then we’d be supportive,” Des says.
Police are getting benefits of streaming already, albeit into the city’s main stations, with council security staff overseeing feeds into four police stations, Coolangatta, Broadbeach, Surfers Paradise and Southport.
From there a supervisor will inform police on the streets what’s going on – streaming footage straight to iPads would cut out the middle man.
“We have to ask ‘what is the benefit of that?’” Des says.
“You have it streamed to a local police station – do you really want to run down the street looking at the iPad when you already have radio communications that tell you it’s the guy in the red shirt?
“For me being the district officer, it’s about what is the intent, how are you going to use that – how is that going to make our operations better, how is that going to make our prosecutions better? Because that information is available now.
“Having said that, if it does give us a benefit – and I’d like to see how it works – we’d certainly be supportive of including that in our cache of mobility software.”
Then there are privacy issues that need to be resolved, like exactly what are the police going to do with that information?
Des says police will have to ensure strict guidelines around the use of information and make it clear “the intended purpose is X Y and Z”.
“These are things we haven’t looked at because we haven’t resolved the technical issues yet.”
There are plenty of those, the most pressing being security of the sharing network – and ensuring no network crashes.
“Streaming on the 4G netowrk can be quite slow so that’s one of the issues we’d have to work through,” Des says.
That becomes even worse when there are big public events like Schoolies and the GC600 V8 motor racing with a high concentration of people online in a small area.
“We can’t use the iPad on public Wifi because of security issues.
“It would mean police would have to be issued with another device unless police can solve the issues with the 4G network.”
Just as cautious about live streaming of CCTV footage to beat cops is Inspector Kuhn, the police liaison.
Bruce simply asks “What’s the point?” when it is already streamed by council into police stations who can inform police on the ground.
Also, when there is a big event or special situation happening, the police Surfers Paradise headquarters have a separate space for a special joint emergency area that's set up and can access the footage.
Des adds: “The bottom line is we are investigating the opportunities, what’s available in the commercial market and we would be keen to get a trial up as soon as possible.”
Neither Bruce or Des have any such caution about the increasing Big Brother creep of the city with its expanding camera network.
“From the point of view of police,” Des says, “if you are not doing the wrong thing, you have nothing to fear.
“It is a great tool and not only that, but in England they have these overt cameras that protrude from the ear – it keeps the police officer in check because they know it’s being videoed. And it keeps the person they’re speaking to in check as well.
“And where we have had complaints against police for excessive use of force, then what a great tool (to have footage) to use to check the validity of that complaint.
“There does have to be a balance with people’s civil liberties. I under-stand that. I’ve got family. I respect you have to have a right to privacy – however, if it’s known, it’s out there that the police have access to cameras and they are there, certainly that balances some of that civil liberty concern out.”
In the meantime, the police will continue to work closely with council on dealing with the hurdles.
“We are not in the business of providing security cameras into a community.
“That’s not our business,” Des emphasises.
“However, when we have got a responsible council who has a Safer Surburbs forum which has police at the table to discuss what they can do to assist in having a safer Gold Coast and we are able to say we are supportive of their CCTV program to the extent that we may be able to stream information – to assist in investigations – to individual officers through our mobile device program, that’s a great thing.”
And it’s a great thing for everybody in society, Des emphasises.
“The safer the city, the more tourists are going to come here.”
Overall, Des is very excited about the potential for advancements to policing via technology and cooperation.
“The advancements in IT are similar to the moment we got to use DNA evidence in crime-fighting – these advancements are as exciting as that,” Des says.
He adds: “These cameras are actually the guardian angels of individuals.”
Meanwhile, back at the secretive CCTV nerve centre, network coordinator Guy says cooperation with police is one of the key factors that its success is measured by.
“We do feel pretty good that we are contributing something of value. It works, it gets results.
“It sounds a a bit corny but we feel like we have a general partnership with the police in facing the security issues of the city.”
YOUR THOUGHTS? Email ryan.keen@news.com.au
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