LOMPOC, Calif.—In September, the Lompoc Police Department will begin phase one of a three-part, citywide video management project to enhance the department’s ability to monitor activity within the city. During this initial phase, the department will add in-car cameras and new computers from RoboVu, to enhance each officer’s situational awareness and assist them in prosecuting cases, said Captain Larry Ralston, who has been leading this project for the Lompoc Police Department.

The video system from RoboVu, which partnered with Insight Video Net to design the system, will allow officers to tag events in the field and will wirelessly upload video to a server when the car returns to the police station. “This gives officers the freedom to use tools that they don’t usually use in their cars,” Ralston said. “With this new system, officers can tap into cameras remotely and watch surveillance from their patrol cars at hotspots where there’s gang activity.”

In phase two of the project, the city will begin installing a wireless mesh system and initially add 12 cameras. The city currently has no video cameras in place. In addition to mounted surveillance cameras, which will be a mixture of stationary and PTZ, the police department also plans to place covert cameras in gang-infested neighborhoods.

Ralston said the public has been very supportive of the city’s efforts to install this system. “There was a huge city-wide cleanup effort recently where 450 residents volunteered to cover up graffiti around the city. It would’ve been nice to have covert cameras available to put where the graffiti was the heaviest and then monitor those cameras to pick off the people doing the damage,” he said.

The department is also evaluating the use of license plate readers in police vehicles, which can largely improve officer efficiency and patrolling. Ralston said the department isn’t interested in red-light cameras because the city doesn’t have the traffic flow at its intersections that would warrant the investment in the technology.

Having all the video integrated together will help officers track and store evidence and will help them be more efficient, Ralston said. While the files will remain individual pieces, those pieces will all be tagged with identifiers to tie them together to specific cases, so “when (officers) need to bring up evidence for court, it’s far more accessible and manageable,” he said. “We can make evidence available in minutes.”

In the final phase of the project, the department hopes to build its partnership with private companies to share video. “I know there are a couple of banks in the city that have expressed interest in sending live video to us and we’re hoping we’ll be able to do that,” he said. Also in this final phase, the department plans to integrate the 12 existing cameras used to monitor its 23-bed jail facility, including cameras in its four interview rooms. Although these existing cameras are all analog, Ed Foster, CEO and co-founder of RoboVu, said it was fairly simple to add an encoder and tie them in with the system.

One of the major reasons the department of 51 officers was able to undergo such an extensive project was because the municipality installed a city-wide Wi-Fi system. “Several years ago I worked for a police department that had an in-car video system and it was an early version using VCRs. It was good, but incomplete,” he said. “When I came to this department, we began looking at different ways to use the Wi-Fi system the city installed several years ago that was used mostly for city services such as meter reading.”

Knowing it had the network infrastructure in place, the city applied for a Homeland Security Grant to provide the funding for the cameras. The department ended up winning the $400,000 technology grant, which will go towards installing the city-surveillance system.

However, this project has had to overcome some serious hurdles before it even began. One of the biggest challenges has been researching and learning about what type of system to implement. “We’re police officers trying to do something that is usually left up to IT people,” said Ralston. “We’re having to learn as much as we can, as quickly as we can, and finding out what questions we need to ask – that was a challenge for us.”