Reducing Violence
How security cameras helped King City police improve safety
Situated 51 miles southeast of Salinas,
King City, Calif. was incorporated
in 1911 as “City of King” in honor
of pioneer Charles H. King, whose
success at farming created a need for railway
access to what became known as King’s Station
in 1886. With its beautiful, tree-lined
streets and quaint historical downtown, the
city serves as a gateway and access point for
Pinnacles National Park and the Monterey
County wine region. Since the first settlers
arrived in the 1880s, King City has grown to
a population of about 13,000.
In recent years, however, King City has
become known for a different reason; in both
2013 and 2015, the city’s homicide per capita
rate for victims between 18 and 22 years of
age was the highest in the state of California.
The main reason for this is that the city had
become a point of contention in a turf war
between rival Latino gangs to the north and
south of King City.
Welcome on Board
This is the situation Police Chief Robert Masterson
walked into when he came on board
in July 2016. With a department of 17 sworn
officers, including the chief, police faced an
uphill climb in curbing this disturbing trend.
“For an average town of about 13,000 people, 17 officers is adequate,” Masterson
said. “But for a violent town of 13,000, it’s
woefully inadequate.”
Part of the city’s process for addressing
the problem was to form a committee
of community members charged with producing
a plan to reduce King City’s youth
violence. After working for six months, the
committee came up with a 23-point strategic
plan its members felt would alleviate the
problem. One of those points was to install
video surveillance cameras throughout the
city, which Chief Masterson says became a
primary focus for his department.
“The idea for a camera system came to
light because a city north of us has a camera
system,” Masterson said. “When I looked
at that and thought about what London and
New York have, I saw a benefit of cameras
from a prevention standpoint just to deter
crime. There was also an investigative aspect
that was attractive as well.”
Good Recommendations
Based on a recommendation from systems
integrator SurveillanceGrid, the King City
Police Department selected Hanwha PNM-
9081VQ 20 megapixel multi-sensor directional
cameras.
“I believe in listening to the people I’m
paying, so when they said this was the right
camera, we took their advice,” Masterson
said. “They showed us the resolutions between
the Hanwha camera and others on
the market, and it was obviously a much
better resolution with more frames per
second, which provided us better visibility
with cleaner and clearer images. The
Hanwha cameras gave us a much more detailed
image at night.”
With four sensors with 5 megapixel
resolution each, the vandal-resistant cameras
offer triple codec H.265/H.264/MJPEG,
combined with WiseStream II technology
for ultimate compression without sacrificing
image quality. Bandwidth efficiency is
important because the cameras send video
wirelessly back to servers located in a command
center within the King City Police Department.
The combination of leading-edge compression
technologies has also been critical
for reducing storage requirements. Initially,
the police department used the Hanwha
cameras’ on-board motion-based analytic to
trigger recording but has since switched to
24/7 recording instead.
“We’ve found that if the cameras are recording
all the time, they can often capture
images outside of the motion range, so we’d
rather fill our hard drives than miss something
that may be occurring in the background,”
Masterson said.
Capturing Video
In terms of placement, one of King City’s
priorities was to install cameras in locations
where the police department would be able
to capture video of anyone coming into or
going out of town. This was important because
most of the shootings were perpetrated
by people from outside the city.
“When all was said and done, we installed
93 cameras in about a three-and-a-half-mile
area, with another 52 planned for phase two.
So if you go from one side of our city to the
other, we are guaranteed to capture you on
camera,” Masterson said. “We publicized the
camera system as a deterrent, letting gang
members know we’re watching them coming
and going from our city.”
The cameras are typically located at intersections
the police department determined
to be a high priority for traffic flow
and points of activity. There are four cameras
mounted on a pole or light post at each intersection.
Three of the cameras face the intersection,
with the fourth looking at the pole
itself, “for self-preservation of the camera
system,” Masterson said.
Looking for
Relevant Information
Video is mostly used for investigative purposes.
If an incident occurs, the first thing
the police department does is review video to
see if any relevant information was captured.
This came into play early on, shortly after the
first camera pole was installed in late 2017.
With information gathered from a camera
mounted at a local business, King City Police
Department was able to find a vehicle
involved in a shooting rather quickly, despite
having a limited amount of video to review.
“The vehicle drove by the only camera we
had functioning in the city at the time within
minutes of the shooting. The Hanwha cameras
gave us enough detail that we were able to
write a search warrant on a specific vehicle,”
Masterson said. “We seized on the deterrent
aspect by making sure to include the fact that
our one camera captured a shooting in our
city in a press release.”
As King City looks to transform itself
from a point of contention in a violent gang
war to a safe place to live and work, Hanwha
cameras have played a key role in the city’s
positive results so far.
“We’ve been working to change things,
and the Hanwha camera system is working
wonders,” Masterson said. “Last year, we had
32 shootings and three homicides but since
the cameras were installed, we’ve only had
one shooting since the start of the year.”
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2019 issue of Security Today.