Surveillance is a Money Issue

Mar 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Randy Southerland

AMERISTAR CASINO AND HOTEL is one of Kansas City's most successful gaming destinations. Its 2,900 slot machines and 100 gaming tables attract an steady stream of gamblers and fun-seekers and generate an equally impressive flow of wagers and profits.

Keeping safe the thousands of guests that crowd its 130,000-sq. ft. gaming area — not to mention the millions of dollars that pass through its counting rooms — is a formidable task. It requires a strong security team and the technology to monitor the complex and fast-changing activities taking place in every corner of the facility.

A driving force for parent company Ameristar Casinos Inc., a Las Vegas-based gaming and entertainment company, has been acquiring the best available technology to ensure that team members on the ground can both do their jobs and meet the increasingly stringent requirements of state gaming commissions. That dedication led the company to begin a five-year effort to install digital video recorders at each of its seven properties.

“In the changing world of digital that we are now entering, surveillance in the casino industry often becomes a money issue,” says Dan Redding, Ameristar's vice president of security and surveillance.

It requires an investment to make the leap from purely analog recording and surveillance to digital, but Ameristar officials knew the transition would be immediately beneficial.

“Over five years we will increase (digital equipment at each property) by 20 percent until we reach total digitalization,” Redding says.

The Kansas City property has become the showcase for this effort because of its demonstration of how much the use of digital recording of images from CCTV can improve team efficiency and deter crime and other mischief.

A long-time customer of Bosch Electronics (formerly Philips), the casino company selected the Hi-Q Real-Time Digital Video Recorders to store and process images from its cameras. Every hour of the day, the casino's CCTV system provides constant monitoring of activities on the floor, at the tables and around the slot machines.

“As a company, Ameristar is always trying to be on the cutting edge — especially when it comes to surveillance,” says Walter Sirorine, corporate director of surveillance for Ameristar Casinos Inc. “Because surveillance is so scruntinized by the gaming commissions, we always try to look for the best possible equipment.”

The Bosch DVRRT Series Hi-Q digital recorder provides real-time video recording with compression to maximize hard-drive space for simultaneous recording, archiving and playback. Due to the ease of use, casino officials can quickly settle disputes with clear and indisputable evidence of what actually occurred.

“In the past we would get a dispute between a player, and you had to have the observer get up, go over, grab that particular tape, come back, rewind and set up,” Sirorine says. “It was time-consuming. So one of the biggest issues that we have been able to solve with digital is to go back and verify whether a bet was there or not while the table games department may still be on the phone.”

What once might have taken many minutes can now be solved accurately within seconds using the Bosch Archive Player software. The achived video clips copied to internal hard drives or CD-ROM use a dedicated standalone archive player to view secure video files. All recordings have embedded codes to prevent tampering and to ensure the authenticity of each clip.

The system gives authorities clear high-resolution images that help to provide facial recognition in the cage areas — where most of the money is kept. These images can be repeatedly downloaded and copied to other media with no loss of quality even over time.

“When there's a question of ID theft at the cages, we are able to go back immediately and pull that video and supply the gaming commission with a quality photo of the person that is at the window,” says Chris Cover, surveillance director of Ameristar Kansas City.

On the other hand, “when we made a dub using the VCR it would deteriorate over time unless it was cleaned every day, which tended to be cost-prohibitive,” Sirorine adds.

With fast access to high-quality and secure video, the surveillance team quickly addresses any problem. For example, if a guest claims that an incident has taken place, they can pull up the video from the camera covering that location and go immediately to the time sequence in question.

This capability is particularly important in the slots area where players can cash out and receive a ticket they can take with them to another machine — TITO or Ticket In/Ticket Out. In some instances, an individual may walk away without taking this ticket and by the time he returns it has been picked up by someone else.

“We are able to go back and find this guest that has taken the ticket,” Sirorine says. “In almost every case we are able to get the money back to the rightful owner.”

The system's Bosch interface also allows for alarm inputs. If a door is forced or a panic button pushed, the system immediately brings images from the camera covering the area to give monitoring officers a view of what is transpiring in real-time.

At Ameristar, security is truly everyone's job.

“It's not just surveillance, it's the entire team of the security department, the slot department, the table games people,” Sirorine says. “They also go through extensive training to be on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary in their particular areas.”

Each Ameristar department has its own team trainer, and those individuals provide the instruction needed to ensure that every staff member is aware of threats in their areas, he adds.

The move from old-style VCR recording to modern digital video was driven by the advantages provided by the new technology. In addition, gaming commissions around the country are beginning to recognize these advantages as well. The Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission, for example, decided to require all gaming properties — including Ameristar's Council Bluffs riverboat casino — to convert to digital recording technology by 2011.

While other states have not made similar demands, Ameristar is not waiting. The company is moving forward to ensure that each casino has the best possible equipment for protecting guests, team members and property.

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