"Not the Usual Suspects": A Study of Factors Reducing the Effectiveness of CCTV

Previous research on the effectiveness of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) has focused on critically assessing police and government claims that CCTV is effective in reducing crime. This paper presents a field study that investigates the relationship between CCTV system design and the performance of operator tasks. We carried out structured observations and interviews with 13 managers and 38 operators at 13 CCTV control rooms. A number of failures were identified, including the poor configuration of technology, poor quality video recordings, and a lack of system integration. Stakeholder communication was poor, and there were too many cameras and too few operators. These failures have been previously identified by researchers; however, no design improvements have been made to control rooms in the last decade. We identify a number of measures to improve operator performance, and contribute a set of recommendations for security managers and practitioners. Security Journal (2010) 23, 134-154. doi:10.1057/sj.2008.2; published online 6 October 200

'Accessing all areas? interviewing and researching within and outside difference'

This case study is set against the backdrop of field work and research I conducted during my PhD. My doctoral thesis explored the intersections of race, medical sociology, and embodied experiences of health, risk, and ethnicity, later published in a monograph titled Health, Ethnicity and Diabetes: Racialised Constructions of “Risky” South Asian Bodies, with Palgrave Macmillan. For the research, I carried out interviews, participant observation, and ethnography with British South Asian people in several locations around England. One of the consistent central questions that I found myself both asking and strategically ignoring was “How do I get access to these groups,” in the knowledge that the category “these” both constituted my own current identities and a historical, lived, experiential identity, located in migration, nationality, language, ethno-religious identity, and class. This case study, therefore, both looks back at my experience of carrying out the research and re-narrates what the access and non-access to people’s cultural lives and worlds come to mean in research. I also attempt to situate the learning from this within a wider framing of the uncertainty that is present in all research. The sense and understanding of connection between researchers and participants should be viewed as an opportunity to embark on a relational understanding of social phenomena and the need to be open to the possibilities of connections between aspects of our identities as processual features of the research

Fifty ways to leave …… your racism

“Racism does not stay still; it changes shape, size, contours, purpose, function…people’s attitudes don’t mean a damn to me, but it matters to me if I can’t send my child to the school I want…if I can’t get the job for which I am qualified…the acting out of prejudice is discrimination and when it becomes institutionalised in the power structure of this society, then we are dealing not with attitudes, but with power.” (Sivanandan, 1990: 65) The above is a quote from a speech given by Ambalavener Sivanandan, then director of the Institute of Race Relations, UK. The quote is from a speech given in 1983, during a period of constant racialised turmoil, discrimination and violence, and starkly renders our multi-racial, multi-ethnic, culturally syncretic UK landscape in powerful racially rendered hues. Thirty-four years after this speech, we are seeing a newly revived racialised antagonism which has been fuelled by both political machinations of old, as well as by recent national, European and global economic contexts. Our contemporary landscape is marred by increased racial violence, intensified far right and White supremacy movements which openly embrace and express anti-Black, anti-foreigner, anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiments. In 2016, both the UK EU referendum and the US presidential elections, with unexpected outcomes, were characterised by a variety of racialising validities. The build-up to the ‘Brexit’ campaigns were punctuated by what could be seen as flashpoints where the possibility of intense racialised conflict loomed. These flashpoints related to principally ‘immigration’, and notionally the UK’s state as a ‘sovereign independent country’ and its right to more tightly protect its borders and to prevent terrorism (by ‘home-grown British Muslims’). Much has been written about this within the last year (e.g. Bhambra, 2016; Jones et al., 2017; Raja-Ranking, 2017; Virdee and McGeever, 2017; Wood and Patel, 2017), and what we are witnessing again is inexhaustible othering, dehumanising and essentially, race-making – the reproduction (and contestation) of ‘race’ and racial categories

The Impact of Dispersal Powers on Congregating Youth

Purpose: To present research which evaluated the impact of Dispersal Orders in an English town. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study used a mixed method design to, qualitatively, explore the impact of the intervention on young people and, quantitatively, the impact on recorded crime/anti-social behaviour. Findings: The use of Dispersal Orders in the town being studied highlighted a number of issues detrimental to young people. Powers appeared to be used to control the congregating rather than anti-social behaviour of young people and their use could increase young peoples’ feelings of vulnerability. Practical Implications: The findings suggest that Dispersal Orders (and the newer Public Spaces Protection Orders) may be ineffective if they are used without the focus of a specific anti-social behaviour issue. Social Implications: The findings suggest that the use of Dispersal Orders to deal with non anti-social behaviour issues are likely to alienate young people and have the potential to inadvertently place them at further risk. They also suggest that the Public Spaces Protection Order could very well exacerbate the substantial issues which have been identified in the present research. Originality/Value: This research is original and suggests that the negative findings of earlier pieces of research into Dispersal Orders can be replicated in very different geographical environments and in areas with low levels of general deprivation where no substantial anti-social behaviour issues were identified. Furthermore, it uses original data to contextualise contemporary developments in anti-social behaviour, namely the introduction of Public Spaces Protection Order

Reconstructing Sikh Spirituality in Recovery from Alcohol Addiction

This paper situates Sikh identity, spirituality, and recovery from alcohol addiction within a nexus of complex social, psychological, and cultural factors. The way in which affected people in Sikh communities in Britain are able to locate and utilize unofficial recovery trajectories, often successfully alleviating suffering, presents both academic research and service provision with potential puzzles. While Sikh communities have been long settled in the UK, there is still a dearth of extensive, multi-method, and analytically rich research investigating the role of spirituality and Sikh identity. We present existing models of recovery process and locate them against an individual psychological and sociological backdrop, so that through the use of spirituality, recovery along this route is interpreted as having both otherworldly as well as materially grounded formations. It is this duality, we argue, that is prominent socially, culturally, and psychologically as important in the recovery from addiction. The multi-factorial nature of this mechanism of change raises important questions for not only addiction recovery, but also notions of continuity and change in Sikh identity. We aim to contribute to this growing body of work in order to re-situate the role of spirituality and identity in alcohol addiction recovery

To catch a thief - You need at least 8 frames per second: The impact of frame rates on user performance in a CCTV detection task

The new generation of digital CCTV systems can be tailored to serve a wide range of security requirements. However, many digital CCTV systems produce video which is insufficient in video quality to support specific security tasks, such as crime detection. We report a study investigating the impact of lowering frame rates on an observer's ability to distinguish between crime and no crime events from post-event recorded video. 80 participants viewed 32 video scenes at 1, 5, 8, and 12 frames per second (fps). The task required observers to determine if one of three possible events had occurred. Results showed that the number of correct detections, task confidence decreased significantly at 8 fps and lower. Our results provide CCTV practitioners with a minimum frame rate level (8 fps) for event detection, a task performed by CCTV users of varying skill and experience

The impact of COVID-19 on BAME populations: a systematic review of experiences and perspectives

Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic (BAME) populations have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, having amongst the highest rates of infection and mortality. Additional risk factors for BAME populations include older age and living with poverty and deprivation. Information has emerged, but peer reviewed research and literature examining the experiences and/or perspectives of this most recent of diseases on BAME populations is fragmented and lacks coalescence. This systematic review will therefore bring together and integrate existing and emergent evidence around the experiences and/or perspectives of COVID-19 on BAME populations

A study of an operative outcome of a basitrochanteric fractures of the hip treated by dynamic hip screw and enders nail with percutaneous canulated cancellous screw

Background: Basicervical or cervicotrochanteric fracture of the femur is considered stable variety of fracture pattern. Most common incidence is seen in elderly patient and in young patient with probably high energy trauma. Appropriate Osteosynthesis confers excellent outcome when reduction is optimally achieved.Methods: 86 basitrochanteric fractures had been treated with enders nail or dynamic hip screw (DHS) at our institute by a single surgeon. Implant selection was done purely based on plain radiograph, associated co-morbidities and fracture geometry. Patients had been followed up at 1 month, 3 month and 6 month.Results: In our study there were 86 patients out of which 63 patients (73.25%) were treated with enders nail and 23 patients (26.74%) were treated with DHS. Mean age of patients was 57 years. We noted minimum follow up of 8 months while maximum follow up of 4.5 years where as mean follow up duration is 18 months. We almost noted excellent to fair results in both groups.Conclusions: Most of the implants in basitrochanteric fractures worked on control collapse principle. Both DHS and enders nail with percutaneous cc screw follow this principle and when used with a proper technique, optimal reduction usually fetch the favourable outcomes with minimalistic approach

Peregrine: A Pattern-Aware Graph Mining System

Graph mining workloads aim to extract structural properties of a graph by exploring its subgraph structures. General purpose graph mining systems provide a generic runtime to explore subgraph structures of interest with the help of user-defined functions that guide the overall exploration process. However, the state-of-the-art graph mining systems remain largely oblivious to the shape (or pattern) of the subgraphs that they mine. This causes them to: (a) explore unnecessary subgraphs; (b) perform expensive computations on the explored subgraphs; and, (c) hold intermediate partial subgraphs in memory; all of which affect their overall performance. Furthermore, their programming models are often tied to their underlying exploration strategies, which makes it difficult for domain users to express complex mining tasks. In this paper, we develop Peregrine, a pattern-aware graph mining system that directly explores the subgraphs of interest while avoiding exploration of unnecessary subgraphs, and simultaneously bypassing expensive computations throughout the mining process. We design a pattern-based programming model that treats "graph patterns" as first class constructs and enables Peregrine to extract the semantics of patterns, which it uses to guide its exploration. Our evaluation shows that Peregrine outperforms state-of-the-art distributed and single machine graph mining systems, and scales to complex mining tasks on larger graphs, while retaining simplicity and expressivity with its "pattern-first" programming approach.Comment: This is the full version of the paper appearing in the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), 202