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When a young adult in Ripon, Calif., beat up another person at a park and stole a skateboard, he probably thought he got away with it. No one else was around—including any cops—and he took off before the victim even picked up his cellphone. Besides, this was a petty crime; the police have more important things to do than track down an unidentified guy with a skateboard. He had gotten away with it.
That's what the young thief probably thought for about four to six minutes—right up until an officer that didn't even see the event transpire showed up and brought him in to the station.
Two years ago, Ripon, Calif., became the first municipality in the state to implement a citywide wireless mesh network that provides broadband access to government employees, with realtime push capabilities from applications on the system. Lockheed Martin developed the solution, using outdoor Mesh 2.4-GigaHertz radios from Motorola, wireless backhaul from Trango Broadband, and routing, switching and firewall protection from Cisco. Microsoft equips mobile units with the operating system and provides authentication to the police network, and NetMotion Wireless' mobile technology enables roaming between the outdoor mesh and AT&T commercial networks. First-response vehicles access the network through MobileVision video cameras with DVR and auto-upload capabilities from L3 Communications, and more than 50 Sony zoom cameras provide realtime strategic surveillance at sites throughout the city—from parks to well sites, major roadways and school campuses.
"We looked at what we wanted to do especially after 9/11, to ensure we are the keepers of our system," says Richard Bull, Ripon's chief of police. With no infrastructure in place to support citywide coverage, wireless was the only option. Now, the distributed backhaul architecture supports 100 Megabits of total aggregated bandwidth on the backbone that can be attributed anywhere.
"Any information we need to get in the field, we can push from the system," Bull says. "We use it for a variety of things—from running data information from patrol cars, to setting up a mobile command post running live streaming video back to the department. It's been rock solid."
In the case of the park thief, the victim placed a call to 9-1-1, where dispatchers immediately accessed streaming video from a zoom camera at the location. The person was identified exiting the scene, a nearby police officer alerted, and both thief and skateboard recovered.
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