Dillingham is a busy coastal community located on Alaska‘s Bristol Bay. With a population of 2,300, the "Sockeye Salmon Capital" is best known for the abundance of salmon and its commercial fishing industry. From May to August each year, between 5,000 and 8,000 tourists and fishermen arrive in Dillingham to work the summer fishing season.
Security concerns
The large transient population in Dillingham during the summer creates additional security concerns for the city authorities. Over the last three years, the community has experienced a growth in the crime rate with an unusually high number of deaths and frequent cases of assault posing a problem for public safety. Although Dillingham has the only police station in the region that is staffed around the clock, the seven patrol officers on duty are no longer able to cope with the onrush of tourists and fishermen in the summer.
Highly detailed images even under extreme weather conditions
The city decided to install a video surveillance system to enhance public safety in specific public locations and in areas where the risk of accidents is high. Town officials determined that this was the best solution for the city because it balanced the need for increased security while utilising minimal resources.
A number of different factors were considered in the selection and implementation of the surveillance system. On the one hand, the customer wanted a digital system, which significantly simplifies the installation and the temporary storage of the images. On the other hand, the cameras would have to be capable of withstanding the extreme weather conditions that prevail in this region - average temperatures from November to March often lie far below the zero degree Celsius mark. The system also had to be easy to operate, eliminating the need for special training courses for the system operators.
"We knew that MOBOTIX cameras were already being used here in the area and that they had proven to be very robust, even under our difficult climatic conditions here," explained Richard Thompson, Dillingham's Chief of Police. The MOBOTIX systems proved to be superior to those of other suppliers in many respects. In addition to easy installation, these systems place a very low load on the network because the data is already compressed in the cameras.
Customised solutions for an individual project
To connect the cameras positioned at different outdoor locations around the city and in a number of public buildings, MOBOTIX partner TecPro Ltd installed a secure network with sufficient bandwidth for the solution. The company utilised an encrypted wireless Ethernet solution to transmit and feed the data to the network at police headquarters. This effectively eliminated the need to install expensive data cables over long distances, thereby simplifying the installation and the subsequent system operation.
The security system is now in operation and consists of eighty MOBOTIX M10 and D10 network cameras. Two to six cameras of each model were combined in clusters for the outdoor locations to provide different viewing angles of the areas being monitored from the same vantage point. Although these "clusters" require several cameras each, they have an advantage over rotating or swivelling cameras with moving parts because they maintain functionality reliably even under extreme weather conditions.
No, Big Brother is not watching you
The city openly addresses the possible conflict of interests with regard to citizens' right to privacy that using cameras for public safety have the potential to create: "It was never our intention to set up a system for comprehensive surveillance anywhere, and that is certainly not what the citizens want," said Thompson.
This was another reason for choosing these cameras: MOBOTIX technology is able to use a very low image resolution to produce fogged out or "pixelated" portions of an image that are irrelevant to security surveillance, or to distort images of people recorded unintentionally by the cameras to protect their privacy. This function proved to be an important point for city administration to allay any fears the citizens had for their privacy.
"The MOBOTIX cameras really fit the bill: they not only make security surveillance easier, they also protect the privacy of persons who are not associated, but adjacent to, areas under security observation," the Chief of Police continued.
Richard Thompson is happy with the results: "We are delighted at how high the quality and the detail of the images are. Now, we have a much higher likelihood of successful investigation, which saves us a lot of costs. Thanks to the reliable cameras from MOBOTIX, we can now guarantee the security and safety of our city, even during the peak season, without having to hire additional police officers, which would certainly increase our costs in the long term."
