Not So Fast

It all started with typical mischief at the skate park--trespassing, destroying property, theft. But with no one on the scene to catch the perpetrators, it was becoming a headache for the Brentwood Police Department in California. That's when the city came up with the idea of a security camera that could be accessed wirelessly through the city network. And that idea got Kevin King, lieutenant in charge of special projects for the Brentwood Police Department, thinking big.

These days, when people in Brentwood--right outside the San Francisco Bay area--walk into a bank or jewelry store or even the town park, they're being watched by strategically placed security cameras. Cameras that provide live, wireless video feed directly to monitors and PDAs installed inside the city police station and patrol cars. And that's just what King envisioned. "We had a retail center open, and unbeknownst until we opened the doors, a small jewelry manufacturing company was a tenant. I said, 'We've got to do a better job of screening and implementing security throughout the city.' It was intended as a general public-safety application, but took on its own life from there."

Of course, the process of developing a citywide video surveillance and security program wasn't a snap. The police department and the City of Brentwood actually "failed miserably" at the first attempt to internally implement such a solution, mainly because of issues with file compression and insufficient bandwidth. "Each analog camera would come through an encoder," says Yun Cho, chief information systems officer for Brentwood. The encoder would then translate the images into TCP/IP-type packets. "But all of the cameras were broadcasting at the same time, all of the time. That was where the initiative failed because the bandwidth just couldn't support the information."

Cho and King decided to try again, this time turning to the private sector. The solution needed to be browser-based, secure, affordable and widely implemented--all while avoiding the "Big Brother syndrome." San Ramon, Calif.-based Clare Computer Solutions promised all of the above, and had previously helped the city deploy a Citrix server farm. "We were looking to partner with someone that could bring forward a solution that not only worked but that could utilize some of the existing security hardware that companies bring to the table," King says, such as the legacy analog cameras already installed. "Clare's solution did that. They also understood the global picture and not just the individual sale--they were going to be in this for the long haul, not just the short buck."

The solution Clare presented to Brentwood relied on Cisco technology, forming a wireless network backbone with the manufacturer's 1400 Series bridges. The bridges connect to 1200 Series access points, and a Cisco ACS Server provides authentication.

"Suffice to say, if you're not part of that domain, you're not coming in," says John Isaac, vice president of sales and project manager at Clare. Clare also installed Cisco's Wireless LAN Solution Engine (WLSE) to monitor the wireless backbone. "If performance on a particular bridge goes down, we get notified. If the bridge dies, we get notified. And if someone goes down to Best Buy, gets a Cisco 1200 Series and tries to get in on the network, we're notified."

Security concerns being what they are, the digital video recorders used allow playback and archiving, which can be done remotely or on-site. In addition, each frame uses 128-bit encryption and is stored as data rather than video. "Once the video is recorded on the DVR, it cannot be changed," Isaac says. "This is much better than the 'watermarking' methods used by a lot of DVR manufacturers."

That said, Clare went with Cisco first for the financial stability. The police and IT department could not go back to the city council for more money, nor did they ever want to explain a chosen technology vendor going belly up. An equally important factor was of course the technology itself. "Cisco has been doing IP for 20 years," Isaac says. "They sit on almost every standards board out there and are in front of the industry." For example, Cisco's new wireless routers--the 3200 Series--will comply with the 4.9-GHz band, which the Federal Communications Commission allocated for exclusive use by the public-safety community. "That will ensure a backbone without interference from every Tom, Dick and Harry running 802.11," Isaac says. He expects to upgrade Brentwood to the new routers when they become widely available. "We took a building-block approach. Today, you can do this; tomorrow as needs grow or more funding becomes available, you can add on without having to throw the foundation away."

To avoid the aforementioned Big Brother syndrome, access to video is automatically routed only when an alarm sounds--either from a break-in or motion detector, for example, or from a manual panic button on-site. Though state guidelines determine who can access the video and other critical data, the retailers can certainly use the network as an internal monitoring system by providing access to their own security or management personnel.

Like any network infrastructure, the solution relies heavily on redundancies for consistent uptime. More hot spots mean increased reliability, of course, because each hot spot brings enhanced bridging and wider reach. So far, various retailers, gas stations and restaurants have come on board, with plans for a new medical facility to be added once built. The city also hopes to incorporate three arterial retail developments that literally divide Brentwood with the adjacent city of Antioch.

In addition, planning commissioners are in the process of writing the system into conditions of approval for commercial developments. "That was a chicken game, because we can't identify tenants before occupancy," King says. "There are all kinds of businesses that we don't want to impose this on. I don't want to go into the nail salon, for example, and impose on them the same condition for a security video that I do on a bar. The liability is not there, though certainly if they want to play, we're glad to have them at the table." That said, participation is encouraged for appropriate businesses more often through liability incentives--the city offered the digital video recorders as a liability loss-reduction solution to general contractors, for example, and participation, in turn, led to arrests in two incidents of construction-site robberies.

To Catch a Thief

The video surveillance and security program is not meant to replace the conventional taping system used at the local 7-Eleven to show the judge who stole a pack of beer, King says. Instead, it's for the takeover robbery, or the holdup at gunpoint, or the violent husband confronting his wife in the bathroom of a Home Depot.

"The officers sitting in their vehicles 300 feet away can see live video of what the perpetrator is doing and where he is going on their monitors or PDAs," Isaac says. "That improves safety for the officers and shortens the time it takes for them to respond." While the police will be the primary users of the system, Cho expects other city officials will benefit from a citywide high-speed wireless security network. "Engineers and inspectors can access their GIS system, as well as their e-mail and online applications at certain access points in the field," he says. "It really improves productivity."

But, generally speaking, the system is meant to act as a crime deterrent, and that can make measurement of success somewhat difficult. King expects an increase in arrests and decrease in crime rates over time, but the real goal is keeping the city safe.

"What we wanted to do was bring in a system that enabled us to publicly say that, as a result, the bad guys will do their dastardly deeds someplace else," King says. "Clare helped us do that, and will continue to moving forward. Businesses will recognize that the losses they're not incurring are the real value."