The States of Jersey Police sought to improve their ageing CCTV that they managed across the island’s town centre, airport and harbour, besides their headquarters-based custody suites. They also wanted to enable specific police officers to have secure access to relevant cameras to help them track suspects between the island’s key entry points, with a view to reducing crime.
Early in 2014, Jersey Police bid for and secured £400,000 of funding from the Criminal Offences Confiscation Fund for upgrading of CCTV. This Jersey-specific fund, which pools assets seized by the authorities during crime prevention, can be used for projects which have a proven a link to the prevention and suppression of crime. As well as upgrading the CCTV cameras to IP video in the town, harbour and airport, the police wanted to bring all these previously separate systems into one single video management system based in police headquarters in St Helier (pictured). The police’s IT department specified an IP-based open architected video management software (VMS) platform which could provide a highly secure, role-specific desktop PC access to over 90 cameras across these four systems.
Ian Robins, Communications Infrastructure Manager, Information Technology, Jersey Police:, said: “We had more than 80 potential users of the combined system. But some officers only need access to specific cameras. Some need to control the movement of the new external PTZ cameras down in the town centre while others do not. Some needed access to recorded video, while others just needed access to live images – according to their roles and seniority. We needed to control these permissions through our existing IT infrastructure using Active Directory ideally.”
After a review of VMS systems, Milestone XProtect Corporate was chosen. Milestone enables permission-based access to images, set up and managed via Microsoft Active Directory. Milestone Inter-Connect provides resilient integration with all four XProtect Express VMSs, which themselves manage and record video data linked to the four separate CCTV systems. Headquarters also saw an upgrade of its CCTV control room. A new six-screen video wall with 42-inch NEC Hiperwall displays high resolution images driven by XProtect Smart Wall. Operators determine which cameras are displayed on their desktop and the video wall during incidents using an XProtect user interface controlled by standard keyboard and mouse.
Jersey Police say they have been able to deliver centralised management and maintenance efficiencies, while also supporting the force’s goal of making Jersey a safer place to live in and visit.
Numbers
A total of 22 new IP cameras were deployed in Jersey Airport in April 2014. A further 26 IP cameras replaced the ageing CCTV cameras in the harbour area of St Helier in June. A total of 23 X-Series IP HD ruggedised Redvision cameras were deployed to replace ageing CCTV cameras in St Helier’s town centre. Migration work was completed in ten days during October 2014 without any loss of coverage. These high specification IP cameras offer multi-megapixel and full HD (1080p) resolution colour images around the clock. Milestone XProtect collects continuous recordings from all town centre cameras which are set at 25 frames per second. A total of 90 days of recordings are held on a 90TB HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 server. While the XProtect Xpress VMS is configured on four local servers located in the areas they serve and configured to hold video recordings for 31 days.
