VIDEO SECURITY TO THWART CRIME AND ENSURE PUBLIC SAFETY

The Regional Transportation District in Denver, Colorado is a public agency created in 1969 by the Colorado General Assembly to develop, operate, and maintain a mass transportation system for the benefit of 2.9 million people in RTD’s District. Over 2,400 square mile covered by the District include all or parts of eight counties: the City and County of Denver, the City and County of Broomfield, the counties of Boulder and Jefferson, the western portions of Adams and Arapahoe Counties, the northeastern portion of Douglas County, and small portions of Weld County annexed by Longmont and Erie.

THE CHALLENGE

The Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD) manages a massive transportation system. With dozens of facilities and thousands of vehicles, RTD relies heavily on video surveillance to keep its system safe for passengers and workers by thwarting crime and supporting criminal prosecution. With such a large area to control, the RTD security team monitors over 1,000 cameras around the clock across its transportation network. Prior to the Qognify solution, the district relied on a distributed non-networked surveillance system. When a malfunction occurred, security team personnel had to physically go the location of the equipment and manually repair it. This wasted time, money and valuable resources that could have been allocated to more proactive security roles.

THE SOLUTION

SECURING CRIME PRONE AREAS AND REDUCING CRIME WITH QOGNIFY’S VIDEO MANAGEMENT SOLUTION RTD began deploying the Qognify video management solution in select locations and quickly realized its utility and value. Soon after, the district began installing the video solution across its entire transportation system, which had to support over 1000 cameras. By leveraging its IP network, RTD now has a fully networked and integrated video management system with quick and easy retrieval of high quality video.

THE RESULT

SECURING BUSES WITH AN ADVANCED MOBILE SOLUTION High resolution video recordings pulled from the Video Management System have enabled RTD to increase situational awareness, enhance the safety of the entire RTD light rail and bus transportation system, while significantly reducing crime across the Denver RTD system. In 2012 the solution evolved to cover on-board recording on its bus fleet, deployed in all of its 1100+ buses. The solution enhanced RTD’s investigative efficiency considerably by automatically offloading these video recordings and integrating them with various other video and audio sources to create a unified event timeline. (In the past) “we had to pull hard drives off of buses for 20-40 cases per day,” said Bob Grado, Transit Police Commander and Manager of Integrated Security Operations for Denver RTD. Given that Denver RTD conducts over
9000 investigations annually, video camera failures and inaccessible recordings were a significant problem. EXTENDING THE SOLUTION TO SITUATION MANAGEMENT By 2015, the video management system had grown to over 12,000 fixed and mobile video cameras that are spread across Denver RTD stations, facilities and assets. The solution was augmented with Situator, Qognify’s Enterprise Incident Management platform – achieving unified management of disparate systems and adaptive workflows that guide operators and field personnel actions with organization best practices. This helped Denver RTD immensely to transform its past experience into actionable intelligence.

THE CUSTOMER

„If the transit system isn‘t perceived as safe by passengers, it will be under utilized and unable to fulfill its remit or revenue requirements“, Bob Grado, Transit Police Commander and Manager of Integrated Security Operations for Denver RTD. “The integrated surveillance system helps us keep our rails safe for passengers.”

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