Display of Justice

Officers find new way to monitor cameras as Florida courthouse expands

• By Kathleen Rhodes
• Sep 05, 2007

THE 13th Judicial Circuit is one of Florida’s fastest-growing trial jurisdictions. In order to accommodate such growth, the court recently expanded to occupy two adjacent six-story buildings in downtown Tampa. The additional space helped ease the court’s busy calendar, but created a new problem for security officers. They now needed a way to monitor more than 100 cameras located in two buildings.

According to Kirby Jungers, the court’s director of facilities, finding room to accommodate racks of additional monitors would have required significant time and money.

“We would have been forced to either remodel our existing security center, split our monitoring facilities between two rooms or move our entire operation into a larger space,” Jungers said.

Finding the Right Fit
But when Jungers learned of the Pelco Multiviewer, he knew he had found a solution. The system provides a space-saving and energy-efficient alternative to racks of monitors. With this highly scalable software system, users can easily go from one to 60 image windows on a single display, and then size and position those windows any way they want. Multiviewer even allows digital and analog signals to be combined on the same display.

The 13th Judicial Circuit paired Multiviewer with two DLP 50-inch displays, giving security officers the ability to simultaneously monitor cameras throughout both buildings from one central monitoring station.

“We now have the ability to monitor 120 cameras from one room without adding more monitors,” Jungers said.

How It’s Working
A virtually limitless number of display layouts can be created and managed with Multiviewer. Security officers at the 13th Judicial Circuit maintain their preferred layouts by saving individual settings to hot keys. Customized labels and color-coded borders also help officers quickly identify which cameras they are monitoring.

“It’s working out great,” Jungers said. “Multiviewer is doing exactly what we need it to do.”

After the system was installed, Jungers was still astounded by Multiviewer’s versatility and performance.

“The clarity of the picture is fantastic,” Jungers said, “and we were able to adapt the system to meet our specific needs.”

This article originally appeared the **** 2007 issues of Pelco Press.