The agency, the nation's third largest sheriff's department, manages between 7,500 and 10,000 inmates in its jail system, and had relied on multiple tape-based systems for jail monitoring. But the creaky old systems had grown undependable.
“Reliability was a major concern as MCSO encountered a lot of persistent technical problems with the older platform, encompassing corrupted tapes, cameras that suddenly went offline and ongoing system failures,” said Lt. Brandon Jones, the office’s public information officer. “There were no alerts when something happened, so the office was constantly fighting a battle instead of being proactive.”
In addition, the archived footage was difficult to retrieve. It could take as long as 60 days to identify, access and retrieve a month's worth of surveillance data, Jones said.
“MCSO struggled to produce footage from its tape archive in a timely manner, which made it difficult to respond quickly to investigation requests,” he said. “In many investigations, data needed to be pulled off within hours, if not minutes.”
To select its new technology, the MCSO assembled a team of five officers and hired a contractor to establish selection criteria and vet various solutions. The office chose a unified IP security platform from Genetec linked to Bosch high-definition cameras. Sierra Detention Systems solutions integrated with DataDirect Networks storage give the MCSO a single-pane view of the entire security environment, complete with touchscreen controls for both video and audio recordings.
Jones said that the new system, which currently is being installed, offers the following benefits:
- An office administrator can quickly retrieve footage from the storage repository, which archives surveillance and sensor data for up to 60 days.
- The amount of data the sheriff’s office now captures and archives has increased significantly, and the new system is still 10 times faster than the old one. As a result, MCSO can double its recording capacity to exceed 2,500 incidents each year.
- An officer can now pull 12 hours of full HD video in 17 minutes, a task that would have taken at least three hours in the past.
- The MCSO can scale the current 5.5 petabytes of storage to as many as 30 petabytes.
“They need enough storage capacity to retain the high resolution images and the performance to retrieve needed content quickly,” she said. “Organizations need fast access to many hours, days or weeks of content and they need it quickly in order to react fast when surveillance content is called upon.”
Funded through Maricopa County’s Capital Facility Improvement funds, the project’s return on investment will be measured in response time and overall performance.
“MCSO is looking for as little downtime of the overall system as possible while still maintaining 100 percent coverage across the detention centers,” said Jones. “The speed, reliability and effectiveness of the new video surveillance and security system are important. They have already been able to increase coverage from 89 to 100 percent of current facilities.”
Jones said that one of the lessons learned during this project was to involve as many stakeholders in the decision as possible.
“Don’t rely on just the technical experience to design and deploy such a critical system,” he said. “We truly believe that we have changed the culture of our jails by improving this technology, but only because we involved the best internal technical experts and detention housing and operational experts, as well as our most important employees, our line staff. Doing this, we were able to consider important regulations as well as items that have improved the daily lives of our line staff, making their daily duties a little easier.”
