A Case in Point
City of Santa Ana achieves interagency video sharing with enterprise command center software
Located in Southern California, the city of Santa Ana is home
to more than 330,000 people, making it the second largest
city in Orange County and the 11th largest city in the state.
The city, which encompasses a geographic footprint of
more than 27 square miles, is also home to numerous local, state and
federal agencies that occupy facilities within the Santa Ana Civic
Center complex, including the Ronald Regan Federal Building and
Courthouse. Given the sensitive nature of these buildings and the
agencies located within them, police wanted to have comprehensive
surveillance coverage of the area. They decided to implement Sure-
View Systems’ Immix Command Center software as part of a videosharing
initiative that would enable police and other agencies to leverage
each other’s camera assets.
According to Santa Ana Police Officer Otto Laufer, who serves as
logistics coordinator for the department’s Urban Area Security Initiative
(UASI) office, the police department’s foray into video surveillance
began in 2008 with the installation of 48 cameras inside the
department’s administration building. Shortly after seeing the success
of their camera deployment, however, Santa Ana police wanted to
expand the reach of the system to include other critical areas of the
city, such as the aforementioned civic center. There was just one problem:
The city did not own most of the buildings inside the complex, and police would have to convince the stakeholders involved to allow
them to install cameras.
“We wanted to put cameras on buildings, but we knew that permanently
affixing them to buildings we did not own was probably
not going to happen,” Laufer said. “So, we found a solution where we
were able to place our cameras on the identified critical buildings in
a non-penetrating fashion. We ended up with 35 cameras in our civic
center area on those various buildings.”
But beyond just putting up cameras for their own use, Santa Ana
police had a much larger goal in mind as a part of the video expansion
project: to achieve video sharing between the city and the other
stakeholders within the civic center. Of course, this is much easier
said than done in most circumstances.
As many people involved with municipal surveillance projects
can attest, getting all of the various departments and agencies within
an individual city on board with sharing video can be a difficult challenge
to overcome in and of itself. Once these hurdles are resolved,
the technical challenge of consolidating and sharing all the disparate
video systems remains.
“When we approached them about this project initially, we knew
going in that these different entities likely had camera systems for
their own buildings, but what they probably didn’t have was an inward
view toward their facility,” Laufer said. “This was something
that, if we were successful in this project, we could give them. In addition,
if we could find a way to share that feed with them, perhaps
they would be willing to share some of their camera feeds that look
out from their buildings with us. That was really the ultimate prize: a
mutually-beneficial arrangement between us and all of these government
or private entities.”
Realizing that most of these agencies probably were using camera
systems from different vendors, Santa Ana police needed a platform
that could interface with various video networks and help them share
their cameras feeds without the city or any of the other stakeholders
having to provide access to their private, secure networks. While
working with Siemens to install the rooftop cameras, one of the engineers
recommended Immix as a solution to this quandary.
The software would prove to be a game-changer for the city, given
its ability to pull together disparate video systems and share the views
from different cameras with everyone involved.
Immix overcame the technical challenge of integrating the various
deployed technologies, opening up the video streams to enable
concurrent, real-time sharing across agencies during a crisis. The
city’s disparate devices now work as one integrated system, and each
stakeholder can quickly access the video he or she needs. The city
benefits from true situational awareness using a common operating
picture, which supports cohesive and coordinated action between the
various departments.
As a result of using Immix for video sharing, the city of Santa Ana
has realized a tremendous return-on-investment (ROI). In addition,
the platform has already played a key role during several events. For
example, Santa Ana police were able to share video with their counterparts
in Fullerton, Calif., last year during a high profile case. By leveraging Immix, Santa Ana police were able to contact the watch
commander in Fullerton, who sent officers to the city to provide security
during the trial, and provide him with views of protests outside
the courthouse. This enabled them to reduce the amount of resources
they would have normally had on the scene.
Because it is Web-based, Immix was also incorporated into the
Santa Ana police’s mobile command post, which essentially serves as
a mobile command and control center, complete with a bevy of audio
and visual equipment as well as computers for officers to use during
various events. When they use this mobile command unit, they use
Immix to seamlessly tap into all of their camera resources, which in
the future will include helicopters and other additional city assets.
“Immix is working great and has been a very successful tool for us.
It has done everything we wanted it to do,” Laufer said. “The feedback
has been very positive. We did a big rollout meeting where we invited
all of the partners who allowed us access to their rooftops for our
system and presented Immix, explaining how they benefit from it.
We got nothing but praise. They were impressed. The biggest benefit
to them was it didn’t cost them a dime. It is a system and a software
we purchased, that we put together and gave them that would have
otherwise been costly for them to achieve.”
Because the city has proven its video-sharing concept through
implementation, Laufer said the possibilities for expanding their
surveillance network are virtually unlimited. Police are working to
broaden the scope of their own surveillance system in the civic center
complex. In the coming years, the ultimate goal is to expand video
sharing across Orange County and provide video verification of duress
alarms to local businesses, using Immix as the backbone that ties
everything together.
“If a duress alarm gets pushed in a bank and we have the capability
to see their cameras via Immix, then it can alert a dispatcher
who can verify if something is actually happening or not,” Laufer said.
“That has cascading benefits; it saves the officer that is responding a
lot of time and gives him enhanced information in a shorter amount
of time. We can also evaluate the situation before we even send an
officer out there.”
For Laufer and his team, the software promises more than just
video sharing and verification of alarms. The department is currently
exploring the integration of their core access control system into Immix
so they can have greater situational awareness of their secure
parking areas in and around police headquarters.
“We see this software platform as the enabling technology for the
community of independent public and private systems to operate collaboratively
and deliver real-time, city-wide situational awareness,”
Laufer said. “Immix allows us to use existing technology to improve our
ability to respond quickly and effectively to any emergency situation.
“Our partnership with the city of Santa Ana Police has enabled us
to fine-tune our software into a truly unique tool that can be used by
other cities and counties to bring together disparate video and other
security platforms to deliver real-time situational awareness of any
event, as well as enable real-time sharing of important data across the
entire network of first responders,” said Rob Hile, director of enterprise
command centers at SureView Systems “In addition, Santa Ana
paved the way for Immix to be listed as an authorized purchase under
the Department of Homeland Security’s Urban Areas Security Initiative
Grant Program.”
This article originally appeared in the October 2015 issue of Security Today.