A case study about Police Scotland’s communications vehicle that covered the Open Golf Championship in Troon, during the biggest annual golf event in the UK, last week. Police Scotland’s duty is to monitor the site which saw over 173,000 visitors during the four days of the Championship.
Police Scotland overt technicians deploy regularly across Scotland: to sports venues, the Scottish Air Show, music festivals such as The Wickerman Festival and Coloursfest, football matches and the recent Grand Prix of the Seas at Greenock. Their Mercedes van includes generator and back-up batteries that also routes power provided by the venue to the police-deployed CCTV cameras at the site, including a mix of analogue and high-resolution IP devices.
Site builds at these events are sometimes challenging, as some venues require the mobile unit to connect to cameras across considerable distances of coaxial cable networks to record large volumes of streamed IP camera data. To meet this, the police’s overt technical vehicle has been upgraded to integrate with diverse CCTV systems and local infrastructure within a small footprint to fit the limited racking. Veracity’s upgrade included Instek’s CCLite as the video management software (VMS) client for the vehicle, with a pair of Instek 2U 16 channel recorders for the video feeds. Veracity’s HIGHWIRE Powerstars and CAMSWITCH Quads were installed into the Mercedes to connect to the cameras via a centrally-deployed Peli case which links to the vehicle through the embedded site network.
The mix of night-day, thermal and HD cameras across the venue were controlled centrally from the vehicle, and field-tested with a laptop nearer the camera position using the Lite version of the VMS. This year’s release of the Instek CCLite App means that the presentation of the camera feed to the controller’s screen can now be seen on a tablet or smartphone, providing more flexibility for commanders on the ground.
David MacGregor, Senior Technical Officer, Police Scotland, says: “Veracity’s ability to provide innovative solutions and reliable products has enabled us to continue upgrading our vehicles and exploit emerging technology in a very tight space, without having to revisit the system connectivity. Veracity have always provided great assistance and since their products were installed we’ve had no extra costs which, along with reliability, is very important.”
Kingsley Greenman, Director of Technical Projects for Veracity who worked with Police Scotland on the upgrade, adds: “The ability to connect into legacy and/or upgraded infrastructure upon arrival at a venue, plus a programme of introducing IP cameras, has resulted in a very practical, efficient and highly-capable service being delivered from a single mobile unit. It is now feasible to deploy and be fully active on site within three hours of leaving their base Station, providing a fully-functioning Security Control suite utilising innovative technology from Veracity for video surveillance recording.”
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