CCTV helping police catch criminals and safeguard the vulnerable
It's helping Cumbria Constabulary solve crimes in a fraction of the time
Cumbria Constabulary are utilising a new tool which will work alongside the county’s new HD CCTV capability to significantly enhance their ability to investigate crimes, find missing people and safeguard the vulnerable.
In January, the Constabulary announced the roll-out of its new HD CCTV cameras across the county. Building upon those enhancements, the force has introduced a new object-focused analytical capability which allows officers to search tens or even hundreds of hours of CCTV footage in a fraction of the time it would have taken a police officer or member of staff.
The technology is drastically reducing the cost of resourcing such work and the time it takes to identify key evidence in cases including missing person enquiries, rapes and serious assaults.
Cumbria’s Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner, David Allen, said:
“This is a fantastic use of new and emerging technologies for the benefit of the people of Cumbria. The introduction of object analytics into our CCTV system is going to significantly help the Police identify both criminals and those who are vulnerable more quickly.
“In many situations, time is of the essence. The ability to search through hundreds of hours of footage in a short amount of time could, quite literally, be the difference between life and death.
“This demonstrates that Cumbria Constabulary, already one of the best performing forces in the country isn’t resting on its laurels. We are looking to continually improve services and how we deliver them and this amazing capability to identify objects will also give the Police back time to investigate more reports and to help better protect our county."
The new object-focused analytical tool can take attributes recorded on CCTV and make them identifiable, recordable and searchable.
Chief Superintendent Carl Patrick said:
"Building on the roll-out of our improved HD cameras across the county, this analytical tool is helping ensure we extract the maximum benefit for the public from that investment.
“The tool is proving invaluable to our attempts to find missing people, safeguard vulnerable people and to help officers working on operations investigating significant and serious criminality.”
What does the object-focused analytical tool do?
It recognises whether someone is male or female, adult or child.
No other human or identifying attributes are recorded - not hair colour, not skin colour, not gait.
It recognises colour of upper clothing and whether long-sleeved or short.
It recognises colour of lower clothing and whether long or short
It recognises hats, face coverings, backpacks and whether anything is carried in hand, such as a bag or umbrella
It estimates height, speed of travel and path of travel across the screen
An example return result may be:
Adult
Male
Blue long-sleeved top
Brown long bottoms
No hat
No Face covering
Wearing a backpack
Nothing in hand
All of this information is stored as metadata behind each and every object on the screen, meaning a busy street scene can be categorised and logged within seconds.
This metadata allows the footage to be searchable, by applying a number of filters, removing objects that the person searching is not interested in, and quickly bringing you to the target that you’re looking for.
Many hours of footage can be searched in just minutes, but the final decision around whether the person or vehicle is who/what you’re looking for remains with the operator.
The tool also allows for vehicles to be searched for, by colour and type (e.g. car, van, bike motorbike, etc)
Case Study: Gerard McBlain
On 14 April 2024 a burglary occurred at an address in Montague Street in Barrow in which numerous items were stolen including a bank card and clothing. The clothing taken included a black fleece with a rip close to the armpit.
A total of 36 hours of footage was run through the Briefcam system, covering 12 CCTV cameras in Barrow, with the system successfully identifying the suspect from his clothing in numerous places in a matter of minutes.
The suspect had used a bank card taken during the burglary at a newsagent and the CCTV showed the offender wearing a black fleece. Upon the suspect’s arrest, the fleece – complete with the rip near the armpit – was recovered.
The CCTV evidence helped detectives compile enough evidence to secure a guilty plea from the offender – Gerard McBlain, of James Street, Barrow - for the offences of residential burglary and fraud. McBlain was sentenced to more than two years in prison.
Cumbria Constabulary’s CCTV Manager Andy Petty said:
“The analytical tool is extremely useful to my team and police officers through drastically reducing the amount of time required to search through footage and significantly increasing our ability to quickly find potentially life-saving information.
“A recent example saw the tool used to analyse and search through 250 hours of footage in less than two hours, returning more than 450,000 searchable objects.
“This would previously have taken at least four days of work to complete.”