Government Video, October 2004

No Witness Intimidation
New Orleans gears up wireless surveillance system
By Nancy Caronia

While New Orleans wasn't the U.S. city with the most murders in 2003 - that honor belongs to Chicago - it did rank highest in terms of murder per capita. Most of the city's high crime rate is attributable to gang activi­ty, and even though the arrest rate is high, conviction rates hover somewhere in the teens. Apparently, witnesses are reluctant to step forward.

New Orleans Mayor Nagin came up with a seven-point plan not only to fight crime, but also to improve the accountability within the criminal justice system. At first, the plan incorporated surveillance cameras into the overall application, but once the statistics were analyzed, a surveillance network became a central component, according to Greg Meffert, CIG, city of New Orleans. "These cameras are going to be one thing," he said, "the witness that won't be intimidated."

Immediate Gratification

A four-month pilot project, which put into place an IP-based network, was initiated in April. Security systems integrator Southern Electronic Supply, in conjunction with Verge Wireless Networks, placed more than two-dozen Neighborhood WatchCams, manufactured by Active Video Solutions and using Sony HD cameras, in high-risk neigh­borhoods. The cameras were connected to the police department's IP backbone where On-Net Surveillance Systems' NetDVR-64 solution system monitored, recorded, and remotely accessed the cameras over a wired and wireless IP network.

Success came quickly when the police department captured a murder suspect within 48 hours of the pilot project's start. Officers were dispatched to the scene after a camera picked up a high-resolution image of the suspect and sent it to the district station.

"He began running and the officers lost him, but then he was seen on another cam­era a few blocks away and, at that point, he realized what was going on," said Meffert.

"When the second camera picked him up, he shot it, but we had built into the system that if a camera is disabled, the last digital image would automatically post to the district sta­tion. We got the guy on high-resolution digi­tal shooting the camera out. I've done a lot of things with tech, but this was pretty wild to see technology get that involved."

That incident made it clear that various degrees of shielding and vandal resistance would be needed. Some cameras were out­fitted with shielding that could take an AK­47 round, while others received shielding that could withstand 9mm rounds.

"It adds costs to the camera, so we couldn't do it with every single one," said Meffert. "There was one camera in the mid­dle of a hard area and people took a couple of shots at it, but we had added full Robocop type of gear and they couldn't dent it. One enterprising person shot a paintball at it and put paint over the lens. We went with extra vandal resistance so the paint drips off."

Virtual Patrol

The high-resolution HD cameras "vir­tually" patrol a 12-block radius and allow officers to read a license plate from four blocks away and see faces clearly (even if the person is moving) at almost 400 feet away. "We had to make sure that people couldn't put on a baseball cap and hide themselves. We had to have cameras that could be sophisticated about the way they panned, tilted, and zoomed in," said Meffert.

Once a camera captures a criminal activi­ty, the city makes sure that the network doesn't alter the data in any way. Additionally, the chain of custody is pre­served; data cannot be put on a server and then moved if the police need it, because technically the chain of custody would be broken. The data has to pass directly from a camera to the district command station and then onto a district attorney (otherwise, the evidence could be considered hearsay).

With an IP network, "everything becomes data," according to Mulli Diamant, vice pres­ident of sales, ONSSI. "There's no video in the system at all. Because the video is over IP it becomes like any other data source. Treating video as video was cumbersome; you needed specific things not to damage the video quality.

"Here the video is basically a data stream and the quality is much higher. In today's video camera, the element that gets the sig­nal is a digital element," he continued. "On a regular surveillance camera, this digital signal was converted to an analog signal - and got degraded due to the distance and type of cable - and then was converted back to dig­ital in order to be recorded on a hard drive. There is no back and forth between analog and digital, and end-users gain quality."

In addition, cameras can be moved as needed. "We're an unusual city in the fact that four times a year we have huge events that double the population," noted Meffert. "You can pick up a camera and hang it somewhere else and it configures itself. We can get more coverage with fewer cameras. During Mardi Gras, we'll have every single alleyway covered, and when it's over we'll move the cameras back into other areas. They're all rolling deployments."

Diamant added, ','The IP component is the glue that makes everything sing together. The most important thing for us was to keep a non-proprietary policing method. All the hardware involved is non-propriety, which is different than existing surveillance, which is based on proprietary equipment. This is one of the biggest advantages to the end-user. It's extremely flexible."

When the cameras were first installed, a source of radio frequency interference was discovered after dark. "Sony sent some engineers to look at it and determined that we had identified a good solution [putting metal shielding around the core of the body of the camera]," said Chris Drake with the New Orleans Mayor's Office of Technology. "Sony has modified the manufacturing process based on this and have a 'New Orleans' camera model now that includes a replacement for the camera body component that now includes metal. It works great."

Court Of Public Opinion

Police officers are outfitted with laptops in most patrol cars, which provide broad­band wireless data connections that allow them to view surveillance camera video through the Tropos Wi-Fi Mesh network. Tropos 5110 Wi-Fi cells, outdoor-optimized nodes based on the 802.11 standard, provide pervasive coverage and have enabled the city to install the cameras virtually anywhere. Plus, patrol cars with laptops can monitor the feeds in real time.

"We've made a map of the city with the camera locations that only the police can see on their laptops," Meffert explained. "The public doesn't have access to it. When the police get a call, they are able to click on the camera before they get to the scene and see a real-time feed, so they know what's going on before they arrive."

According to Meffert, he had to assure the ACLU that the cameras "don't go into anyone's backyard and don't record sound." But general reaction from New Orleans citizens has been overwhelmingly positive - Meffert went on a radio station to describe the surveillance network, and residents called in ask­ing if cameras could be put in their neighbor­hood. When Meffert said the city would look into it, the citizens came back with, "What if I paid for it?" A Web site was quickly put up asking citizens if they wanted to "adopt" a camera in their neighborhood, stating the cost would be between $3,000 and $4,000.

"Within 72 hours we had over 200 sign-ups. That's a million dollars. I was amazed," said Meffert. "What was even more amazing was we thought, OK this is your uptown crowd, but no, it was across all economic lines, race lines, neighborhood lines. I had African-American churches, crime watch neighborhood groups, and everything in between."

The city fully intends to have 100 percent of the city covered by the end of 2005. Already, almost 100 cameras have been dis­patched, with another 140 contracted to be in place before the end of the year that will cover about 60 percent of the city.

"Every once in a while in this business you do get to do something that really does change lives," he said, "Eventually we'll use cameras for red lights, but right now our big thing is crime. I want to have every inch cov­ered before I think about niceties. The traffic isn't so bad, our crime is."

About OnSSI

On-Net Surveillance Systems Inc. offers a comprehensive IP video surveillance control and management solution. Ocularis, OnSSI's IP Video Control platform, is designed to operate on a single platform with unprecedented levels of user-intuitiveness, open architecture and scalability. With core competencies rooted in both the IT and professional security markets, OnSSI's unique solution provides feature-rich camera management, sophisticated recording and archiving, automatic Push Live Video on event, control-room video-wall management and virtual matrix functionality. OnSSI's IP solutions can be found in a wide range of municipalities, federal and local government agencies, as well as enterprise, industrial, and educational settings. For more information, visit: www.onssi.com.