Have eyes, will travel
Atlanta Police Department dispatches Compass solar-powered surveillance trailers, equipped with Axis panoramic cameras and horn speakers, to crime hot spots and large-scale events to help disrupt criminal activity and improve safety.
Adding mobility to a fixed surveillance network
Though the city of Atlanta prides itself on having one of the largest public-private surveillance networks in the country, there are times when the police need more eyes on the situation than the fixed location cameras can provide. Faced with riots and protest marches, illegal street racing and new crime hotspots popping up every week, the Atlanta Police Department (APD) decided to augment its camera network with a mobile surveillance solution that could be deployed quickly and moved from site to site as needed. With help from its strategic public safety partner, the Atlanta Police Foundation, the APD invested in several mobile surveillance trailers from Compass Security Solutions. Soon the police were deploying the trailers to rout out criminal elements from neighborhoods and improve crowd safety at major events like the Super Bowl and the World Cup Finals.
“We utilize these camera trailers more than you could possibly imagine,” says Marshall Freeman, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer for the Atlanta Police Department. “They give us great visibility into areas that our fixed location cameras don’t have.”
Fostering a true design partnership
To ensure that the APD received a high-quality solution, Compass Security Solutions designed and manufactured their own mobile trailers.
Each solar-powered surveillance trailer included at least two Axis network cameras mounted atop a 21-foot mast, an Axis network horn speaker for broadcasting announcements, and a license plate reader to track suspicious vehicles. Compass Security continued tweaking the initial design as they received comments from officers in the field.
“The feedback they gave us on those early units helped us improve our design in a way that made better sense for law enforcement,” says Thomas Frey, President of Compass Security Solutions and Compass Mobile Security.
We try to be nimble when thinking about crime. When a hotspot pops up, we move a mobile surveillance trailer there to give us additional visibility. We use those camera trailers more than you could possibly imagine.
Some of those improvements were safety related, such as changing the trailer controls to the driver’s side of the unit. Other improvements dealt with reliable power, such as the ability to maneuver the solar panels in multiple directions to catch the sun and adding more robust backup batteries and a generator option for the larger trailer which might be running more cameras.
When it came to choosing cameras, APD had a preference. “We wanted the multisensor AXIS Q61 Camera Series because they’d give us the ability to look in four different directions at once,” shares Marshall Freeman. “Pairing them with AXIS Q61 PTZ Camera Series lets us quickly zoom in on the action without losing eyes on what’s happening in the general area, like a suspect fleeing the scene.”
The trailers are also equipped with AXIS P37 Series Panoramic Cameras with remote zoom capability. Some trailers use a panoramic model with higher resolution while other trailers use a panoramic model that is better in challenging light conditions. Trailers are selected based on the lighting environment they will be placed in.
Video feeds from the cameras on the surveillance trailers can be transmitted to the Video Integration Center (VIC) and viewed live by operators. If the operators see unwanted activity not only, can they dispatch police officers to respond, but they can also use the Axis horn speakers installed on the trailers to talk down the people under surveillance. Recorded messages can also be programmed for the horn speakers to play automatically.
“Axis cameras are a good choice for a mobile trailer solution for a number of reasons,” states Thomas Frey. “They don’t use a lot of power. They’re extremely reliable. And they’re very rugged, so you don’t have to take them off the trailer during transport, which makes them ideal for law enforcement use.”
It was also important that the mobile surveillance trailers tie into the city’s Fusus ecosystem – a real-time crime center platform in the cloud. Fusus captures and stores video from city-owned cameras and those owned by local businesses and homeowners who registered their devices into Connect Atlanta, a citywide surveillance camera network. To ensure connectivity, Compass Security equips every trailer with a Fusus core and a radio transmitter for streaming the video into the network.
The company also includes the Fusus core in the trailers it rents to local businesses and other private parties. “This allows the police to tap into those trailer cameras if a crime or traffic accident occurs in the area where they’re being used,” explains Frey.
Staying nimble in a world of moving targets
APD holds weekly meetings to discuss crime stats, identify hot zones, and strategize how to mitigate them. Oftentimes, the solution involves using the trailers to augment a police presence.
For instance, in response to violent clashes with police over the building of a new police training center, APD decided to deploy their solar powered surveillance trailers to protect the 85-acre construction site. “It’s a big site with no power infrastructure,” reports Marshall Freeman. “So the trailers were really our only option as far as surveillance coverage.”
The decision proved a good one. The cameras were able to capture protestors breaching the fenced area of the site and setting fire to the heavy equipment. The video provided the irrefutable evidence needed for prosecution.
When there was a rise in Kia and Hyundai thefts due to a social media challenge that included instructions on how to hotwire the vehicles, the APD looked at its weekly statistics to determine where most of those thefts were occurring. Placing mobile surveillance trailers in those neighborhoods helped deter the activity.
In addition to supplementing surveillance at large-scale events, the APD uses the data collected by the mobile trailer cameras to track attendance and crowd behavior. “It helps us think about how we can better prepare for the following year’s event,” explains Marshall Freeman. “Those insights make for a really good playbook.”
Creating community goodwill
One thing that’s hard to measure is the goodwill the mobile surveillance trailers generate. “Like a lot of law enforcement agencies nowadays, APD is understaffed,” says Thomas Frey. “Officers can’t be everywhere. But when residents see the trailers in their neighborhoods, they know the police are looking out for them.”
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