Coming Soon: TacDesk Circuit — the borough-wide safety layer

Most UK town centres run their public-safety operations across a patchwork of radios, group chats, and paper. A good operator can hold it together with muscle memory and shouting — but police reconstruct events from radio traffic, council CCTV controllers watch feeds blind to what venues are seeing, and every venue's picture ends at its own front door. Nothing about it is digital.

We're building the layer above that. It's called TacDesk Circuit, and we're now looking for our first BID districts and councils to trial it.

What it is

Every participating venue's incidents, banned list, live capacity and body-cam footage, joined into a single real-time picture. Council CCTV controllers and police officers each get their own role-scoped login, right next to the venues themselves. Everyone's on the same channel — but digitally, with search, footage, an audit trail, and far more resolution than radio ever gave anyone.

Circuit is deliberately not "just for the night economy". A busy shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon, a festival, a sports fixture, a shift change at a retail park, a corporate campus at 3pm — the same operational problem lives in all of them: security teams on the ground, camera operators in a control room, and police responding to whatever leaks past both. Circuit gives them one shared picture whether it's noon or 3am.

How zones work

A Zone is a named operational area — a city centre, a ward, a shopping district, a festival footprint, a campus perimeter — defined by a polygon on a map and populated by venues that opt in. Zones can nest one level deep (a whole city containing a "West End" sub-zone). Opt-in is bilateral: the coordinator invites a venue, the venue's manager accepts. Data is scoped to zone membership, so nothing leaks between areas that haven't agreed to share it.

Three ways in, three views

Council CCTV controllers land on a dark-mode live zone map — venue pins colour-coded green for normal, amber for a recent incident, red for a live police-flagged one — with the zone's aggregated capacity gauge, a per-venue breakdown, and a composer to broadcast to every venue at once.

Police officers get the feed filtered to incidents flagged to them, a BOLO ("be on the lookout") tool that pushes an alert and photo to every dispatcher screen in seconds, and banned-list search across the whole zone — one refusal on any door protects every door. Incidents run through a one-tap workflow — Ack → Attending → On scene → Cleared — each step flowing back to the venue that raised it.

Venues keep everything they have in TacDesk today, plus a new Circuit tab: the zone-wide incident feed, the zone-wide banned list, and an inbox for broadcasts from police and council.

The escalation flow — the whole point

When a guard files a serious incident, three new controls sit above Submit: Flag to zone, Flag to police, and an urgency radio — Watching, Attend Soon, Attend Now. Tick "Attend Now" and, in under half a second, the incident is on every on-call officer's phone with a push notification and — if body-cam footage is attached — a play button that hands them a signed, time-limited link to the actual video. Every play is audit-logged.

"Attend Now" also fires a zone-wide broadcast, so the venues either side can lock doors or bump security the moment a neighbour calls for police — not when they hear the sirens.

Why it matters for police, why it matters for councils

For police, it'll be better intelligence than radio has ever given them: real incident reports instead of ten-second descriptions shouted into a headset, footage they can review without a subject-access request, and historical data that feeds straight into licensing and community-safety reports with no re-keying.

For councils, it'll be the situational awareness they've never had over the public space they already answer for. Where a town runs a Business Improvement District, Circuit will be the operational spine that justifies the BID's safety spend — and its reporting will be exactly what a licensing sub-committee or a community safety partnership wants to see.

What it looks like day-to-day

• Shopping centre, midday. A trader flags a persistent theft suspect. The description propagates to every venue in the zone before the suspect leaves the centre. Two doors down, another shop's guard already knows what to look for.
• Football matchday, late afternoon. The council CCTV desk sees a real-time capacity gauge for every pub and bar inside the fan zone, and can coordinate messaging with venues if any one place is filling too fast.
• Late-night high street, 1am. A serious incident lands at a bar. "Attend Now" goes out — every dispatcher on the strip sees it, police get it with the body-cam, the two venues either side lock their smoking-area doors.
• Festival, all-day. A single Zone covers the whole footprint. Every stage's security, the medical tent, the site control room, the police liaison — all on one board.

The pilot we're looking for

We're recruiting our first pilot districts now — a BID or council coordinator, a police liaison, and a meaningful cluster of venues in one zone. The bar we'll hold ourselves to is deliberately hard: real venue count, active escalations, and zero ICO complaints over a ninety-day window. General availability follows once we've cleared that bar with a real partner.

The commercials

Circuit is Enterprise-only. Participating venues need to be on TacCommand — the top TacDesk tier — for the audit and data-sharing controls the scheme demands. The zone coordinator (council or BID manager) pays an annual coordination fee, and police forces get complimentary access — their advocacy is what sells the product to councils.

Interested?

If you run a venue, sit on a BID board, or work in a council community-safety or night-time economy team, we'd like to hear from you — and if you're a police licensing officer or safer-neighbourhoods lead, same. Get in touch.

Book a free demo · See how TacDesk works · View pricing

Related Articles

• → Two New Betas: Auto Dispatch and In-Car Alerts
• → What Is TacDesk?