Sunday, October 08, 2006

CCTV Recordings for sale, please have the right money ready

This article in the South London Press stated Transport for London bosses are planning on allowing the bus operators to charge the Metropolitan Police (and presumably other forces i.e. City of London, BTP), for the time spent looking through CCTV... which strikes me as a little absurd! The feature quotes a "Go-Ahead" spokesperson saying "Where the police require CCTV from a number of buses for one investigation we may have to make a charge to the police due to staff having to be diverted from other duties to provide the evidence."

A Transport for london spokesperson said: "Some of the bus operating companies have been bearing the costs of responding to out-ofhours and particularly time consuming requests from police for the retrieval of CCTV footage. Others have already set out a charging policy for such requests."

But, Glen Smyth, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, branded bus firms' demands "unreasonable". He said: "They have a duty to assist the police and I would have thought it was in their commercial interest to do everything possible to ensure the safety of passengers. At the end of the day we can seize footage anyway in the same way we would seize someone's computer if we felt it contained evidence. But we should be working together - not against each other."

... which is one of the things that the Mayor keeps banging on about... of course, as evidence, the police could (in theory) stop the bus and look for the recorded disc... but that may well involve waiting around for said bus to come back... as any enthusiast who's waited around some parts of London would tell you, that bus will not always be coming back...

posted by Suzy Scott @ 12:50

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