Crime-fighting cameras double as disaster management tools through software upgrade

by Lawrence Cummer
Thursday, 03 July 2008

The University of Windsor, Ont., is turning an investment in fighting crime into a tool to help manage disasters.
The school’s Campus Community Police this year deployed the first phase of an extensive surveillance system, using IP-based CCTV video cameras from Axis Communications, across its campus and is closely tying them to two new software applications as part of a new emergency management system.


Chris Zelezney oversees emergency management for the University of Windsor’s Campus Community Police. He says the CCTV video cameras, of which there are currently 44, run across the university’s existing fibre-optic IP network and will enable the campus police to closely monitor emergency evacuation routes and security deployment areas, plus the more traditional application of curtailing campus crime.

While tightly secured for exclusive access by campus authorities, the cameras can be monitored and controlled from any PC inside or outside the school.

Detailed crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) studies were used to determine optimal locations and select cameras based on various technology requirements. This resulted in a mix of fixed, pan-tilt, wired and wireless video cameras, with various capabilities for low-light.

The Campus Community Police worked with Hamilton, Ont.-based systems integrator AATEL Communications Inc. to choose and deploy the surveillance cameras and Zelezney says they were impressed by the Axis cameras’ picture capabilities. He recalled a sporting event in which he put the camera’s sights to the test.

“The quality on some of these cameras is so good that we had one of our officers on the field with a program in his hand and I was able to read the program using the camera, which was several stories up and at least 500 feet away. The technologies that are emerging now with CCTV cameras are fantastic.”

In light of recent violent crime at post-secondary schools, like the 2006 Dawson College shooting or last year’s Virginia Tech massacre, many universities are looking for ways to ramp up their emergency preparedness, and the University of Windsor is no exception. It was with this in mind that the school deployed the new video cameras, but also chose to integrate them with new mass notification and long-term emergency management systems. He says the goal is to unify emergency management and to support redundancy in the event of an incident.

The university could rely on the disaster response and emergency management capabilities of the local police and other emergency services, but that could put it 72 hours behind if a disaster did hit, Zelezney says.
So the campus police recently conducted a survey of the staff and students in residence and a comprehensive demographics study to determine the best methods for emergency notification. They also did extensive investigation to find the mass notification product that best met their needs. Zelezney said they turned to MIR3 Emergency Notification Software Services, because the service allowed the university to safely secure the contact data retrieved from its community in Canada and adhere with privacy standards and confidentiality requirements.

For a new emergency management system, Zelezney noted that they needed a solution that could manage resources around potential threats of violence and crime, as well as natural disasters and acts of terrorism. In addition, Zelezney says the university needed to be prepared to manage more commonplace accidents like chemical spills.

“But, we have to make sure that we’re as able to respond in the same effective and efficient way to an active shooter, as we are to a pandemic, as we are to a tornado,” he adds.

The emergency management software the university chose was WebEOC Crisis Information Management software, because of its ability to help the emergency management team manage a crisis from start to finish as well long-term recovery from it.

Zelezney says, like the IP-based surveillance systems, both MIR3 and WebEOC are fully remotely accessible and wirelessly capable. Also crucial, both are Web-based and neither is reliant on existing university infrastructure, so that in the event of a power outage they will remain online. The WebEOC application allows custom links to be added into its interface, so both the video cameras and mass notification tool can be accessed directly from the same browser page.

> Learn more about WebEOC products for emergency management and critical infrastructure