“The ability to ascertain why an alert was occurring without having to deploy resources to drive across campus to visually assess a situation is huge,” according to Jim Meade, residence hall security manager for the UMass Amherst Police Department. For example, a residence hall door near a bus stop frequently experiences alarms in cold or rainy weather because people are standing inside the doorway to keep warm and continuously open the door to check for the bus. “This is when the video saved us time and resources in investigations when it was actually a non-alarm.”

Video feeds and intrusion detection alarms are fed to the UMass Amherst Police Department for real-time monitoring and response using the video management system, which provides the capability to add more high-resolution cameras as surveillance needs change and grow, including two new buildings slated to be added to the video network.

Because the university maintains a decentralized video recording approach, where all video is stored locally, a feature in the video management system preserves network bandwidth availability when live or recording video is pulled by other video users and transferred to other locations for investigation.