The "Operational Requirement"

In 1994 the Police Scientific Development Branch of the Home Office established that the key to a successful CCTV system that would produce useful images of evidential quality "fit for purpose" in court was to define what was required before any technical system design was undertaken.

In broad terms this definition was (and is now) used to specify the image content, image quality and recording requirements for each camera within a system before system components and camera locations are selected.

This definition came to be known as the "Operational Requirement".

Well things have moved on a pace since then, of course however many systems have been installed without the benefit of this design methodology and we hear about them all the time when the end results (usually in the form of an incident recording) fail to provide useful material for the police and courts.

Our "Retrospective O.R. Construction" service is here to help with this issue. In practical terms this means that we visit site, look at the image produced by each camera and grade both it and the resulting recording and then advise accordingly. Sometimes this means that a camera serves no useful purpose and should be removed, sometimes it means that a vital area is not covered and an additional camera should be fitted, and sometimes it means that adjustments have to be made to the lighting and/or recording setup.

But whatever else it means it does ensure that once corrected you can thereafter be confident that your system will be "fit for purpose" and able to "produce the goods" when required.   

Contact us for further details