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New York Courts find Security in IP Video By Phil Hochmuth 8/19/05 |
You've heard of the long arm of the law — in New York, its eyesight and memory stretch pretty far, too.
The New York State Unified Court System recently put the finishing touches on a network of more than 350
IP video surveillance cameras. These network-attached eyeballs record every minute of every day in all New York court facilities statewide and link to a multi-terabyte storage system, giving court security officials a powerful tool to monitor and protect their facilities.
But for the court's IT Group, high-bandwidth video is just another stream on an IP network built several years ago with enormous capacity, now tapped to deploy a variety of advanced services. Also supported is a 10,000-seat IP telephony network and more than 100 IP videoconferencing units. Overall, these systems save the courts about U.S.$1 million per year on various voice and video costs, and allow for advanced services such as
comprehensive video surveillance, which were once cost-prohibitive.
The courts last year rolled out a limited
IP video surveillance system, based on open source software written in-house. “This pilot system assembled using Linux scripts and
commodity IP cameras, installed on a shoestring budget, got the attention of court system security officials,” says CTO Sheng Guo.
The pace of Guo's
IP surveillance rollout accelerated this spring, sparked in part by a widely publicized courthouse shooting in Atlanta in March. New York courts have had
closed-circuit video for years, but only on the outside of a few key buildings and main traffic areas. Security officials wanted continuous surveillance in all courthouses and the ability to review video weeks or months after an incident.
A hundred cameras were added earlier this year — new
IP cameras from Axis Communications, as well as older analogue cameras fitted with IP encoders and attached to the LAN. The court system also installed a software suite called NetGuard from
On-Net Surveillance Systems that controls all of the court system's cameras, plus video archival from Axis.
At the court's downtown Manhattan Security Command Center, officers watch video on an array of flat panel displays, showing the court's most heavily trafficked sites. Through an interface that mimics Internet Explorer, an officer can expand a directory of icons, representing all courthouses and facilities. Clicking on each icon reveals locations at each site under
IP video surveillance. One click deeper, and a window is launched with a live IP video feed: a trial in session in Queens, pedestrian traffic outside the Superior Court building downtown, an empty stairwell in Buffalo.
Officers can control the zoom and pan of the cameras via mouse clicks. The windows can be tiled or arranged in a grid, giving a view into dozens of sites at once. Officers can pull up a similar interface on WiFi-enabled PDAs. A few taps of a stylus, and the officer has the same live
IP video feed as the flat panels in the command centre — at a lower bit rate, because of the PDA's tiny screen and limited wireless LAN bandwidth.
"The court system has more than 500 Nortel WLAN access points deployed state-wide for supporting data and video, as well as a test deployment of VoIP-over-WLAN phones for court officers. (Nortel WiFi IP phones are being considered as a back-up communications device to the court's two-way radio system," Guo says.)
The NetGuard System can be configured for motion detection and alerting, for monitoring closed buildings during overnight hours. When a person enters an empty room under surveillance, for example, a shake-up of recorded pixels occurs inside an
IP camera. The software that controls the camera senses this and sends an e-mail, page or phone call to officers.
The
IP-based system allows court staff to open cameras from any PC — even from a home computer via the court's VPN. All cameras are password-protected, and traffic runs on a separated virtual LAN, to protect the surveillance system from unauthorized access," Guo says."
"Closed-circuit video systems have been used across the state in the past, but these analogue systems were functionally limited and expensive,” Guo says. They required an outside contractor, who installed dedicated video cabling and monitoring systems, and tape storage was costly and physically inconvenient.
At Rikers Island Prison 10 miles away (or three hours away, depending on traffic) similar booths are set up in six specially outfitted cells, with
IP cameras behind bulletproof glass. Inmates can talk to their lawyers in private, or appear at court proceedings in front of a judge inside one of the hundreds of IP-video-enabled courtrooms statewide. The law says defendants must appear in person before a judge only for arraignments.
"Lawyers do not have to go all the way to Rikers to see clients," says Frank Cupak, systems Co-Ordinator for New York's 12th Judicial District in the Bronx. "Attorneys can see more clients in a day with the
video system. They also no longer have an excuse to delay a hearing because they couldn't make it out to Rikers."
Source: techworld.com |
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