Video Surveillance for Campus Security
Video surveillance is used regularly, even daily, for criminal investigations and normal activity monitoring.
During large-scale incidents, such as an active assailant or severe weather event, campus-wide video surveillance can also provide responding authorities with critical information about the event in real-time.
Camera Locations
Connectivity, field of view, and budget constraints are just a few of the challenges you may encounter when determining camera locations and quantities. It’s important to have a consistent approach to campus security, particularly related to where and when cameras are deployed. These strategic deployments should emerge from a coordinated planning project, often a Security Vulnerability Assessment (SVA), matched with an annual budget allocation.
Connectivity
Historically, installers had to run dedicated coaxial or fiber optic connections from the command center to each camera location. Today, IP cameras are connected to network switches. While the connection may not be as difficult, management of the bandwidth required to stream high-resolution cameras is a new challenge. Close coordination with the IT department is required to ensure proper connectivity is available.
Video Monitoring
It’s impossible to monitor hundreds or thousands of cameras across a campus. With integrated access control, active entrances areas are a priority on surveillance monitors. Particularly important areas can be left on monitors permanently and emergency alerts can call-up nearby cameras automatically as well.
Command Intelligence
While campus security is responsible for the daily command of security operations, an active assailant situation may be managed from a mobile law enforcement command center. Mobile command centers require access to the surveillance cameras for response teams to evaluate the threat, location, and other key details.
There’s a variety of ways to provide the mobile law enforcement command center with video surveillance feeds. One option is to have a preplan in place that allows the command center computers to connect to the campus camera system. Another option, that’s often simpler, is to have a mobile computer available to be moved to the command vehicle. This allows local management and upgrades of the mobile computer to be maintained regularly. If the mobile computer option is selected, reliable wireless connectivity to the video management system must be considered.
The Right Partner
Our team understands that hospitals, colleges, and universities have many challenges that are unique to their campus. Some campuses are wide open and located in a city environment, but others may be smaller and contained within a building or two. We have the extensive campus protection experience required to ensure security and safety compliance.
Netronix begins by evaluating the challenges, performance expectations, and environmental conditions of your campus. Input is gathered from the security team, facilities staff, IT department, administrators, and other stakeholders. We perform a site survey, inside and outside, to evaluate the physical layout of the campus and uncover potential vulnerabilities. Once the risks and expectations are clearly defined, our team designs a unified security solution to include mass communication. Products from a variety of leading manufacturers are assembled into a custom design and demonstrations of key components are performed on-campus.