COLCHESTER Council’s town centre CCTV network has helped snare 68 criminals over the past four months.

Council bosses launched a staunch defence of the system after recent criticisms about its quality.

The system received a “major upgrade” in 2014 to boost its quality and earlier this year Adrian Pritchard, the council’s chief executive, confirmed there are around 130 council-owned cameras covering the town centre.

They are based across 13 locations and monitored by a specialist team from a central location.

A spokesman for Colchester Council said: “We moved our CCTV monitoring centre to a new location in the town centre in late-2014.

“It also included a major upgrade to IT and monitoring equipment as well as improvements to our processes and procedures.

“We have delivered further improvements to our CCTV network, in the past two years, with significant investment in industry-standard high-definition cameras at 13 locations in the town centre, including Crouch Street.

“While these new HD cameras deliver approximately four times better image quality and much-improved night-vision capabilities compared to standard definition CCTV.

“There is, nevertheless, a limit to the amount of fine detail they are able to capture.

“Furthermore, image quality is liable to diminish and or pixelate when footage is cropped tightly to highlight details in a much smaller section of a single video frame.”

Mike Lilley, Colchester Council’s Cabinet member for public safety, added: “I am enormously impressed by the technical improvements that have been made to the CCTV and monitoring service in recent years.

“The service operates 24 hours-a-day, 365 days-per-year detecting crime and antisocial behaviour in the town centre, and helping to make it a more safe and attractive place for residents and visitors to enjoy.

“Our monitoring team has superb in-depth knowledge of the streets and areas in and around the town centre, and between April and August was able to provide CCTV evidence to the police which assisted in 68 arrests.”

Essex Police and the council are also planning to launch a new initiative to crackdown on anti-social behaviour in the town centre.

The council is investing £240,000 on the Town Centre Action Plan which will see an additional ten new officers joining forces with the borough’s existing team of zone wardens, licensing officers and anti-social behaviour officers.

This will include three PCSOs for the town centre, one for the rural community, six new Essex Police officers and an anti-social behaviour co-ordinator with Colchester Borough Homes.

An additional £10,000 will be set aside to increase the number of Street Weeks initiatives police can hold which see community safety partners work on certain areas intensively for seven days.

Priorities for the scheme will be to crackdown on aggressive begging, street drinking, anti-social behaviour and drugs.