Denver Police Use Video Surveillance System To Help Protect Democratic National Convention

  • Sep 10, 2008
When Barack Obama decided to change the location where he would accept the Democratic nomination for President of the United States only a few weeks before the event, Lt. Ernie Martinez of the Denver Police Department wasn’t worried about changing his surveillance coverage accordingly.

This is exactly the kind of situation Martinez and his team anticipated months before when they and the city and county of Denver awarded Avrio Group a contract to design and deploy a city-wide surveillance system.

“We wanted a solution that was durable enough to be deployed permanently but also had the flexibility to be quickly reconfigured to adapt to short-term events like the Democratic National Convention,” Martinez said. “To ensure this we required Avrio to deploy a pilot in two weeks.”

The Denver police’s initiative, called the High Activity Location Observation (H.A.L.O.) system, was conceived not only for the DNC event but to continue to enhance the department’s crime reduction strategy in ongoing safety and security efforts.

"We're able to not only utilize those cameras as a force multiplier, but dispatch officers to where we see events occurring,” said Chief of Police Gerald Whitman, on who’s vision this platform was conceived three years ago.

In addition the system includes solar powered trailers and PoleCams for even more mobility and video can eventually be pushed to moving vehicles such as police cruisers. Lastly, cameras can be easily redeployed to other areas within the city once the convention ends.

In partnership with Denver’s Technology Services Division, the DPD’s H.A.L.O. team developed leading-edge enterprise, open architecture requirements including real-time, fluid, high resolution video that could incorporate wired and wireless cameras and be viewed from multiple locations and by multiple agencies. To meet DPD’s requirements Avrio designed and deployed a solution utilizing a blend of state-of-the-art wireless technologies including mesh, microwave and point-to-point for video transmission and a software based head-end for video management.

The foundation of the solution is Avrio Group’s PoleCam, a single “plug-and-play” device that contains a high end camera, wireless radio and all electronic components needed to hang the unit on a pole or building. The solution allows for video to be viewed from mobile devices and also allows for integration with other security systems like access control, sensors including gunshot detection, video intelligence and future technologies.

“While we had to meet an aggressive timeline for the DNC it was also important to find a solution that would serve the Denver community for years to come and adapt to emerging technologies,” Martinez said. “We wanted a system that could scale easily and economically as budgets became available, not something that would require a forklift upgrade in a couple of years. The system has exceeded our expectations, allowing us to provide high-quality video to over 60 federal and local government agencies throughout the DNC."

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