The annual Irish Day Parade and Festival held each October in Long Beach, N.Y., grew from about 300 attendees 17 years ago to about 30,000 last fall.
The task of keeping all those people safe falls to the 77-person Long Beach Police Department. With entire sections of the town closed to vehicle traffic for the all-day event, maintaining order is challenging, said Sgt. Bill Dodge.
The police force often encounters problems related to drinking and disorderly conduct at the event, he said. “Policing is very difficult when you have a crowd that large. We needed to be able to get a big picture of what was going on.”
For the most recent Irish Day, city officials installed a temporary wireless video surveillance network from AgileMesh Inc. and Firetide Inc.
The system uses mesh network technology to link all cameras wirelessly. To be connected to the network, each camera only needs to be in range of another camera/radio node, said Joe Stefan, president and chief executive officer at AgileMesh of Richardson, Texas.
The system is designed to provide video surveillance anywhere with little warning. The technology is ideal for situations when time or environmental constraints make stringing cable impossible.
Firetide of Los Gatos, Calif., provides the mesh networking technology for the portable surveillance systems.
They have several applications that are used extensively for law enforcement and tactical deployments, Stefan said.
“SWAT teams use it when they have a hostage situation or an active shooter situation, and they want 360-degree visibility around an incident.”
ASSET PROTECTION
Users can quickly assemble the portable, selfpowered
system for such a situation. For the
Long Beach deployment, an extensive site
survey located the placement of the cameras.
AgileMesh systems were mounted on buildings,
light poles and utility poles.
The system also works well for asset protection when whatever is being protected frequently moves around. NASA, for example, uses it to protect two valuable research planes. As they are moved from location to location, the video surveillance system goes along.
The cameras and radio nodes come in pairs, and there can be two cameras per radio node. The Camera Deployment Units include a single- or dual-dome camera and a heavyduty tripod. The cameras have full pan, tilt and zoom capability and a 23x optical-zoom lens.
The radio nodes are self-powered and contain mesh networking radios and proprietary control panels that allow the user to select various frequency channels. That enables agencies to change the frequency and the service set identifier. Two levels of encryption ensure that nobody else picks up the signal.
The technology’s biggest draw is the ease of setting up and using the cameras, Stefan said. “They don’t need to be a networking expert or an [information technology] person to deploy it,” he said. “They just take them to a location, turn them on and select a channel. The control panel on each node shows the users how many other nodes it is in range with.”
CRITICAL NEED
For Long Beach, having a better — though
temporary — way of monitoring the crowd
was critical.
“An officer on the ground might be 30 or 40 feet away from an incident that’s happening and not be able to see it because the volume of people is so great,” Dodge said.
In past years, commanders on the ground found it difficult to send officers where they were needed. Several of the town bars open beer gardens for the event, and in previous years it was impossible to see which ones were drawing the biggest crowds.
In addition to setting up the surveillance cameras, the police department publicized the technology that would be in place. They wanted revelers to know they were being watched.
The system comes with video-monitoring software that is usually loaded onto a laptop PC in a command vehicle. Dodge said the Long Beach officer manning the laptop on Irish Day needed only about an hour’s training on the software.
AgileMesh’s technology is designed to integrate with agencies’ existing cameras. Analog cameras are plugged into a video encoder that digitizes the picture, and the video is shared on the mesh network. Digital cameras are plugged directly into the radio nodes.
The technology worked so well that Long Beach issued a request for a similar system for its housing authority’s public-housing complex. The town wants a system that will allow officers to tap into a mesh video system from their cars.
“I think this was the best Irish Day we’ve ever had,” Dodge said, adding that the most recent festival drew the most attendees ever.
“It could have turned out to be something pretty bad, and it didn’t,” he said. “It turned out to be a beautiful garden spot, [a] familyoriented event for the entire day.”
Doug Beizer (dbeizer@1105govinfo.com) is a staff writer at Washington Technology.
