With the Christmas party season now upon us, the Safer Caerphilly Community Safety Partnership is keen to highlight to partygoers out and about in Caerphilly county borough this festive period that CCTV will be being monitored to detect any possible disorder that may occur.
CCTV operators at Caerphilly County Borough Council monitor over 150 cameras throughout the borough 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and although we want people to go out and have a fun and enjoyable time over the festive period, people should also be mindful of the presence of the CCTV cameras located borough-wide, and their effectiveness in detecting anti-social behaviour and disorder.
Cllr Lyn Ackerman, cabinet member for the environment said, “Our dedicated team of CCTV operators play a vital role in ensuring our area remains a very safe and pleasant one to live, work and visit.
They are able to detect instances of crime, anti-social behaviour and disorder as soon as they occur, or even before in some cases, and have direct links to officers at Gwent Police who are then able to attend to the situation.
We do not want to spoil people’s festive fun, but I would encourage people to be mindful that any disorder or anti-social behaviour will be detected by our CCTV operators and where necessary reported directly to Gwent Police.”
As well as monitoring over 150 CCTV cameras borough-wide, the CCTV operators also have control of a series of ‘talking’ CCTV cameras in Blackwood town centre, which enable them to issue a warning to people involved in an incident via a speaker system that their behaviour is being monitored, and that where necessary, the police will be/have been called.
These speaker systems have been used very effectively, and in most cases have diffused the situation completely.
In addition, the council also have 12 deployable cameras, called OSCARs, which offer even greater opportunities for more flexible deployment, as well as two mobile CCTV vehicles that can be deployed to ‘hotspot’ locations as and when required.
Help buttons linking straight to Caerphilly’s CCTV operators have also been installed at Blackwood bus station to aid passengers calling for help. The buttons, which are there to increase public safety, are located throughout the bus station and when pressed, CCTV cameras zoom in on the area and allow control room staff to talk to the person who presses the button, via an intercom system.
For further information, please visit the Safer CCB website at http://www.caerphilly.gov.uk/saferccb/.
