Government Technology - January 2009 - (Page 34)

given a physical address. If there’s a disturbance near one of the cameras, staff can get a live look at the area and dispatch the nearest police unit. “We have a 24/7 command and control room with a 28-foot video wall,” Argiropoulos said. “The room is set up like a battleship, with video surveillance specialists sitting around in homeland security desks.” The video is stored for 30 days with more than 90 terabytes of storage at a central location that’s replicated at a backup site. “The technology that’s available now, we couldn’t find five years ago.” Mark Meier, director of information technology, Oklahoma City Technological Advances When a new Oklahoma City police officer arrives for his first day of work, his rank is entered into a computer system that automatically places him into the correct user group, which determines his access level to the citywide video surveillance system. Oklahoma City’s surveillance system covers 555 square miles — with nearly 500 cameras — and streams video to laptops in the police force’s 700 vehicles. When an event occurs, commanding officers who have the proper authority take control of the cameras that are nearest the incident and provide access to officers who are working the scene, controlling which cameras each officer sees. Oklahoma City had big ideas when it first entertained the concept of a video-surveillance system about five years ago. City officials wanted a large-scale system that would be used by dozens of agencies and also structured hierarchically, so that the appropriate people would have access to the appropriate cameras. “Depending on how you do it, you can spend a tremendous amount of resources just in the administration of these things,” said Mark Meier, the city’s IT director. “The technology that’s available now we couldn’t find five years ago.” Meier and others began a partnership with General Electric to create software that would administer the system with little administrative input. Then they teamed with Tropos Networks, a wireless broadband provider, to develop the infrastructure to bring the video into police cars. “The base system was a half million dollars, and most of that was for fiber,” Meier JAN_09 said. “We already had cameras all over the place.” The rest of it was getting those cameras licensed and into the system. The city spent about $5 million on the system overall, but there were tremendous cost savings because of the ground-floor partnership with General Electric. “The concept [of the] meeting with General Electric [was], ‘We will bring local expertise and help you develop this product, and in return you’re going to give us discounts on equipment, on the software, on the licensing.’ You have to have precise implementation plans,” Meier said. With nearly 500 cameras, it wasn’t feasible to put high-resolution cameras everywhere. The city looked for areas where real-time, high-quality video wasn’t necessary and used analog cameras in those places. “A megapixel camera will pump through between 15 to 20 megabytes per second,” Meier said. “That’s a huge amount of data. We said there are areas where we’re going to go with an analog camera and a traditional network connection, and it’s going to pump through a fraction of the amount of data. So by structuring it with different choices in different places to make the most effective use of the technologies — and accepting that you can’t have this beautiful picture everywhere — you are able to reduce your costs significantly.” Oklahoma City chose to use the 2.4 GHz band instead of the 4.9 GHz band for this project, partly because of the deployment’s size, Meier said. “The density of the node placement is significantly lower for 2.4, and 4.9 does not get the penetration that 2.4 [does], so you need more infrastructure for 4.9. For an organization trying to cover almost 600 square miles with Wi-Fi, that is a very key point.” The high cost and high expectations of a large-scale surveillance system — with little or no way to measure return on investment (ROI) — makes it imperative that jurisdictions assess their needs and weigh them against the available options and costs. “I see a lot of organizations that say, ‘We want this and we’re going to take one approach to accomplish it,”’ Meier said. “Well, you just drove up your costs phenomenally. It’s a relatively expensive system and unless you administrate it correctly, I’m concerned the value doesn’t meet the expectations.” Measuring Success These large-scale deployments are relatively new, and it’s hard to measure ROI. “How do you put a price on a life?” Argiropoulos asked. The deployments can be a crime deterrent in some locations, and they can also be used for evidentiary purposes. “We’ve captured several crimes on video that have assisted in prosecution and also deterred a lot of internal affairs complaints,” said officer Eduardo Reyes, video camera administrator for the Long Beach Police Department. “Somebody says, ‘The officer punched me in the face.’ We look at it on video and nothing happened.” Of course, cameras won’t prevent crime, Reyes said. They’re just an additional tool for law enforcement. “If the criminal is going to do something, he’s going to do it whether the camera is there or not. You need something additional. Yeah, we’ll probably catch him next week or next month or next year, but if we have an officer standing there, who’s to say he wouldn’t have committed that crime?” Reyes said putting cameras everywhere wouldn’t necessarily work. “It has to be in certain spots, like the entertainment district. You have to weigh the benefits versus the costs.” 24 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - January 2009

Government Technology - January 2009 Contents Point of View On the Scene Big Picture Four Questions for... Stemming the Retirement Tide Getting the Picture Fact of Matter Money Trail Rays the Roof Trick or Tweet? The Modern Way to Vote Products signal:noise

Government Technology - January 2009

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