Securing the Hills
Software video enables Beverly Hills to expand smart-city surveillance project
- By Courtney Pedersen
- Aug 01, 2010
The city of Beverly Hills, Calif., is expanding its video surveillance
project, and former mayor Jimmy Delshad wanted an IP video
surveillance system as a part of the smart-city initiative. Coming
from a technical background, Delshad saw the opportunity in IP
video to help the city be the cleanest, safest and most sustainable
city it can be.
Beverly Hills has a centralized IT department headed up by
David Schirmer, chief information officer, and Mark Hobson,
assistant CIO. Beverly Hills has integrated Milestone with other
departments of the city, such as fire, police, parks and recreation,
and public works.
“The software has been great because we can manage it centrally
and view it remotely,” Hobson said. “This has really helped
the efficiency of the entire city.”
The Open Platform
The challenge was to find a system that was reliable, flexible and
scalable and would allow city officials to choose the best hardware
for their needs.
“We wanted an all-IP-based surveillance system that would
support the best cameras on the market,” Schirmer said.
Milestone’s XProtect Enterprise is supporting high-end megapixel
cameras from IQinVision. Hobson explained that they
wanted the best quality image available in the market.
“Beverly Hills only has about 35,000 residents but on any
given day, we probably have around 300,000 people coming in,”
Hobson said.
This is no surprise for the most famous zip code in the country.
With landmarks such as Santa Monica and Rodeo Drive,
the surveillance must be reliable. It is no secret that Beverly Hills
is home to many high-profile residents and events, such as the
Golden Globes, which is held at the Beverly Hilton.
Currently, the city has 45 cameras installed. The California
Retention Law requires that archived footage be stored at least 12
months. The city has worked with Milestone integration partner
Mainline Information Systems to build the project in phases.
Winning the Business
Timothy Conwell at Mainline Information Systems secured the
project with Milestone as the business partner.
“Milestone was chosen for the Beverly Hills project after lots
of consideration by the client and our Mainline consulting team,”
Conwell said. “Part of the research included industry tradeshows
and advice from camera product partners that we work with directly.
Milestone was chosen based on integration flexibility, pricing
structure and ease of use.“
The flexibility of scaling was most helpful as the system grows
from a proof-of-concept design with a single server and a few
cameras, to what will eventually be hundreds of cameras placed
over the entire 6-square-mile area of Beverly Hills. The ability
to scale to a multi-server distributed design and bring additional
functions online over time has been a big plus. For example, the
city has the ability to mix and match camera technology for the
camera location and environment they cover.
The city has been very pleased with the feature-rich user interface
and the ability to quickly learn the system. City officials
have implemented a “train the trainer” approach throughout the
project process, which has been very successful.
Since Mainline is a Milestone certified integration partner,
they have been able to work directly with their technical support
staff in some very advanced technology integration strategies,
which include enterprise-level archive storage management by
IBM, high-speed fixed-broadband wireless, and MAN deployment
techniques.
Enabling the City
Soon, the city realized they could also use Milestone XProtect to
monitor the progress of building projects and to ensure safety.
“There is a car house that is being built right now, and we use
Milestone to monitor the progress and to make sure the crew is
wearing hard hats,” Schirmer said.
The fire station requested a camera to be placed on top of one
of Beverly Hills’ towers so they could see and manage situations
by remotely accessing the footage.
In the third phase of the installation, they will work more on
the back-end archiving features and add up to 80 more cameras.
Hobson said he hopes to see more than 250 cameras installed
when the project is complete. The city also is planning to integrate
the software into the city school system and existing businesses.
Hobson also said officials from the Department of Homeland
Security have seen the critical infrastructure as a part of the Urban
Area Security Initiative and absolutely love it. DHS wants
to use Beverly Hills as a test bed for larger cities because of its
unique big-city characteristics.
The city of Beverly Hills already has existing technology in
police squad cars that they want to integrate to the Milestone
solution. The goal is to have complete security running over one
network throughout the city.
The Advantages
City officials wanted a system that had adequate out-of-the-box
features but could integrate the latest features, such as analytics.
“We wanted a reliable system that was flexible enough to integrate
other features and have a low overhead in the future,”
Schirmer said. “Milestone provided all that, and since it integrated
so seamlessly to our system, we did not have to hire a new
person to understand it.”
This article originally appeared in the August 2010 issue of Network-Centric Security.
About the Author
Courtney Pedersen is the public relations manager at Milestone Systems.