University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) has deployed a video surveillance management platform, enabling campus security and safety staff to protect the campus population of 32,000 with a 24/7 view of its video surveillance and integrated access control operations.

Using the Salient CompleteView Video Management Platform, UMass Amherst is centrally monitoring its network of nearly 1,700 IP cameras and legacy analog cameras, safeguarding the 51 residence halls and 225 buildings that comprise the campus environment. With 1,500 acres of ground to cover, UMass Amherst wanted to optimize its video system, and other security integrations, to enable security and safety staff to remotely assess a situation or diagnose an alarm from the school’s Tyco access control platform.

“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.