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A joint
initiative between Cambridge City Council, Halon Bank and other members of
the Cambridge Community Safer partnership has resulted in the launch of a
scheme to increase the safety of cabbies who work all hours serving those
out in the city late at night.
A number
of taxis and private hire vehicles can take advantage of this pilot
project. The initiative provides drivers with a 50% subsidy to help fund
the purchase of Halon Bank CabWatch, an innovative security system
combining CCTV and GPS technology, linking the car and the driver directly
to the police via a central control room, should an incident occur.
Research
has shown that taxi drivers have up to 15 times the average exposure to
occupational violence, this has been highlighted by the death of 31
cabbies in the last nine years. Often the attacker can escape and the
police response is inevitably ‘after the event’. The Halon Bank
CabWatch system changes this and enables the police to be alerted to an
event both day and night before an attack has occurred.
The aim
of the safety scheme is to help protect vulnerable drivers working nights
and reduce the number of incidents of attacks, thefts and vandalism
against taxi drivers and their vehicles. The intention is to deter
‘would be offenders’or, if that fails, to provide visual evidence that
can be used in prosecutions.
Halon Bank
CabWatch has a tiny camera installed inside the taxi, which records images
of its occupants and stores them securely. If the driver feels threatened
or fears an attack he/she can press a secret button, which will send an
alert to Halon Bank’s state of the art monitoring station pinpointing
the location, direction and speed of the vehicle. For added security, an
audio channel transmits the sound from within the vehicle. Once actioned,
the police are contacted, and the images are downloaded from the vehicle
to the Halon Bank Remote Video Response Centre.
The exact
position of the taxi can be tracked by Halon Bank using Global Positioning
Satellite (GPS) technology, and the police can be notified of any incident
allowing them to home-in on the vehicle. Halon Bank’s ability to
listen-in on the activities in the cab whilst storing snapshot photographs
means that should an attack actually take place, the evidence recorded can
be used in court. All images are watermarked, date and time stamped and
encrypted.
Under the
new licensing conditions brought in by the Council, the CCTV systems have
to be compatible with all data protection requirements. With this in mind,
the recorded images are not directly available to the driver or owner and
all images and data are held at Halon Bank’s monitoring centre. Where
another system, other than Halon Bank CabWatch is used, the software would
be restricted to the Local Authority, Police or another approved third
party.
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