Let's Go To The Video

Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM

Correctional officers at Hillsborough County Jail in Tampa, Fla., are spending a lot less time defending themselves against false accusations from inmates since security systems integrator Cam Connections, Pinellas Park, Fla., installed March Networks digital video recording systems.

The Hillsborough County Jail operates under the jurisdiction of the county sheriff's office and accommodates more than 4,000 inmates at its Orient Road facility, located in Tampa, and at the Falkenburg Road jail, located a few miles away. The jail processes more than 70,000 people annually through its booking department, employs 1,500 staff and operates with a budget of $125 million.

Required to investigate every complaint of excessive use of force or other inappropriate behavior, the jail's internal affairs staff routinely summon correctional officers to get their side of the story, which adds to the stress of their job and takes them away from their operational responsibilities. With Ontario, Canada-based March Networks digital recorders and cameras throughout the jail's two sites, internal affairs staff can now dismiss a bogus complaint immediately after reviewing video of an alleged event, says Hillsborough County Jail software specialist Roland Morgado. In many cases, investigations never even involve interviews with correctional officers if the video evidence exonerates them.

Hundreds of cameras were installed when the Orient Road facility was built in 1990 to assist correctional officers responsible for remotely opening and closing doors, but none of them were recorded. A tape-based recording system was subsequently installed in the booking department on the advice of the jail's legal department, but it was “cumbersome to keep changing tapes and search for video,” says Col. David Parrish, commander of Detention Services for the Hillsborough County Sheriff 's Office. It was eventually replaced by a small digital video recording system, but it was only capable of recording video at two frames per second. When a decision was made to expand video recording beyond the high-risk areas of the two sites, jail management opted to start from scratch with a newer system.

“We are now recording at eight frames per second on all cameras, giving us much higher video quality,” Morgado says. Video from cameras covering the facility's exits, sally ports, booking areas and drug-testing rooms are saved to an external RAID storage unit and archived for four years and nine months “to get us past the statute of limitations for filing a lawsuit,” Parrish says. Video from other cameras is saved to hard drives on the recorders.

The March Networks system was recommended by the technical services staff at the Pinellas County Jail in nearby Clearwater. “We spent a morning with them looking at their system,” Morgado says. “The docking station architecture was a big selling point.” The docking station design of the 4000 Series recorders allows the jail's IT staff to replace a hard drive or service a unit without disconnecting any of the cabling, thus saving time, eliminating errors and maximizing system availability.

Thirty-two March Networks recorders were installed in July 2006, providing jail staff with access to recorded video from more than 500 cameras covering hallways, stairwells and building perimeters, in addition to the high-risk areas. Morgado stays busy responding to requests for video from the state attorney's office, the public defender, the FBI and other law enforcement and security agencies. “Often, they don't know exactly what they're looking for,” he says. “They will give me a date and time range and I'll have to research it to see what I can find. Many of the alleged events occur in the booking area where we have a lot of interaction with the inmates. They [the inmates] will sometimes come to us a little intoxicated and, if something occurs there, the authorities will want evidence for court.”

The facility-wide recording system has proven to be “a tremendous management tool,” Parrish says. “It has assisted our supervisors in determining what is actually happening. Every morning, we review our incident reports from the previous 24 hours, and if we have any questions, we can just go back and look at the video.”

One event captured by the video system came as a bit of a surprise. Soon after commissioning the system, a propane storage and distribution facility across the street from the Orient Road jail went up in flames. “It looked like a war zone,” Morgado recalls. “As the propane tanks ignited, they shot up into the air. We were fortunate that we had several pole cameras around our perimeter, so we were able to capture the whole event from the time the blaze first started to the time it was extinguished.”

The new video systems are connected to the jail's network, allowing sergeants and lieutenants from both sites to access live or archived video from any camera.

Next on the agenda is for the jail to expand the system to cover its property rooms, where the technology will streamline resolution of complaints alleging that personal property is not returned when inmates are released from incarceration.

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