Summary

Held in Los Angeles, California, the 2015 Special Olympics World Games (LA2015) was the single biggest event in the city since the 1984 Summer Olympics. To secure the event, LAPD used Federation™-as-a-Service to build a centralized command center with access to over 400 cameras.

Held in Los Angeles, California, the 2015 Special Olympics World Games (LA2015) was considered the single biggest event in the city since the 1984 Summer Olympics, and the largest sports and humanitarian event anywhere in the world in 2015. The international event welcomed 6,500 athletes and 2,000 coaches, representing 165 countries. It was estimated that over 500,000 spectators and 30,000 volunteers attended the Games.

The company

Based on guidelines of a national program called Incident Command Structure (ICS), a plan was set in place to build a centralized command post in a vacant police headquarters. Existing cameras from different venues needed to be accessed for live viewing and video review; but how could the LAPD connect the disparate surveillance systems at each venue, and centralize the monitoring of the event from one unified command post?

The challenge

“Without Genetec Security Center and Federation-as-a-Service, I would not have been able to secure the same level of awareness during the Special Olympics World Games.”

Commander Dennis Kato, LAPD Planning Group, Special Olympics World Games Organizing Committee

Results

After discussions with the Major Crimes Division at the LAPD and a proof-of-concept demonstration, Commander Kato chose the Security Center Omnicast™ video system and the Federation-as-a-Service (FaaS) capability. Since many venues were already running Security Center systems, the LAPD leveraged FaaS, a highly-scalable cloud service, to connect their command post across the multiple sites and monitor over 400 video cameras.

With Commander Kato in charge, the security command post comprised one large, well-equipped monitoring room and over 150 people from various municipal, state and national departments. A massive video wall complemented five monitoring hubs which were divvied up into a UCLA division, a Long Beach division, a USC division, a Los Angeles Convention Center area division and another division for other sports centers and event areas.

The solution

One central city view

“It was the first time at a command post, where I felt I never needed to leave. I had enough coverage to get a feel for what was happening at each one of those venues,” said Commander Kato.

Quick and easy installation

Installation of the service was easy as no on-site servers were required, and the cloud-enabled Federation feature facilitated a seamless connection across all the distributed sites.

Intuitive searches

Operators at the unified command post found Security Center to be very intuitive, and were quickly able to pull up cameras upon request and conduct forensics searches with ease.

Independent system privacy

Ensuring the privacy was key in forming successful partnerships. All parties defined which cameras were shared, which operators could access them, and the level of control over PTZ cameras.

Security Center Omnicast Federation-as-a-Service Feature Focus