Customer Stories
LOCATION: Lexington, Kentucky
CompleteView Makes University of Kentucky Campus Safer
Situational Awareness With Salient’s CompleteView Makes University of Kentucky Campus Safer
UKPD selects CompleteView Enterprise VMS to unify vast video surveillance network
The largest university in the Commonwealth of Kentucky has significantly raised its situational awareness with Salient’s CompleteView video management platform. The Video Management System (VMS) provides the University of Kentucky Police Department the tools it needs to quickly and efficiently respond to security events anywhere on its campus, keeping students, faculty and staff safer than ever.
CompleteView Makes University of Kentucky Campus Safer
Situational Awareness With Salient’s CompleteView Makes University of Kentucky Campus Safer
UKPD selects CompleteView Enterprise VMS to unify vast video surveillance network
The largest university in the Commonwealth of Kentucky has significantly raised its situational awareness with Salient’s CompleteView video management platform. The Video Management System (VMS) provides the University of Kentucky Police Department the tools it needs to quickly and efficiently respond to security events anywhere on its campus, keeping students, faculty and staff safer than ever.
The University of Kentucky (UK) is home to more than 30,000 students and 15,000 employees. Set in the heart of downtown Lexington, the university houses three medical centers, including a Level I trauma center, 18 residence halls and nearly a hundred other facilities across the institution. As the university with the highest enrollment in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the UK Police Department (UKPD) began searching for ways to increase situational awareness to ensure the safety and security of all members of the campus community.
When Dr. Eil Capilouto became the 12th president of UK in 2011, he communicated a vision for UKPD that would take a more holistic approach to campus safety and security. This meant incorporating emergency management, event planning, access control, video management, ID card services, interior and exterior annunciation, mass notification and burglary alarms — tying all of these functions back to UKPD. In a short time, UK’s central security system transitioned from 72 disparate systems to a single system with more than 8,000 access control points and 3,000 cameras.
In 2017, UKPD recognized that its existing hardware-centric system required too much upkeep and was not flexible or scalable enough to meet the university’s growing requirements. Furthermore, it did not provide the necessary situational awareness to keep a campus of its scale safe and secure.
What the university needed was more flexibility, scalability and a more effective way to manage and coordinate security events in real time. To unify the university’s vast video surveillance network and provide a single, centralized security station, UKPD selected the Salient Systems’ CompleteView Enterprise VMS.
This selection process was in collaboration with UKPD’s systems integrator partner, STANLEY Security, and the team at consulting engineering firm CMTA, which was instrumental in providing the university a comprehensive specification for the security system upgrade that matched the specific requirements from UK. Both STANLEY Security and CMTA continue to support the security team at UKPD.
“With Salient, we have moved into a more flexible and scalable software-based environment for video storage,” says Nathan Brown, deputy chief of UKPD. “This more virtualized environment has allowed us to no longer be so physically reliant on hardware, which requires a lot of upkeep. Now, we can pivot by increasing or decreasing storage without manipulating the entire system as a whole.”
Stephen Cornett, security systems manager for UKPD, explains that Salient “provided us the ability to scale a lot better than the boutique system we had before.”
“The scalability and the centralized nature of the VMS has allowed us to expand into some of our off-campus locations. It allows us a lot of flexibility with some leased spaces to be able to provide them more video security in those satellite locations without too much hassle,” Cornett adds.
As a whole, Salient’s VMS provides UKPD a high level of situational awareness. By utilizing the different features, Brown and Cornett have a better idea of what is going on in and around the university. Monitoring everything from student move-in, to sporting events, to on-campus hospitals has been made more effective and efficient. It has even been utilized in the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
University of Kentucky Police Department uses its CompleteView VMS from Salient Systems to monitor game-day activities, including traffic flow and incident response, at Kroger Field, which can hold nearly 58,000 fans.
A prime example of the success of the CompleteView system on the University of Kentucky campus is when an armed man entered one of the university’s hospitals in March 2021. Having recently installed new high-resolution IP cameras that were connected to CompleteView, UKPD was able to immediately use the VMS to locate the suspect and car matching the descriptions provided by the local police department.
The CompleteView VMS also has given UKPD additional situational awareness in other facets of campus operations. Now, UKPD has the ability to fully leverage its two video walls: one at its emergency dispatch center and another in the stadium command center at Kroger Field. The old system, in contrast, only allowed security personnel to view eight cameras at a time. Now, with Salient, UKPD can view more than 20 camera feeds simultaneously. The video wall at Kroger Field is primarily utilized on game days to show traffic flow around the perimeter of the stadium for both pre and post-game management.
“It’s improved our operations because now we can see everything we need to see all at once instead of having to bounce around from camera to camera,” Cornett explains.
From a network perspective, Cornett and his team try to consume as little bandwidth as possible when using the system. Some of the off-campus facilities that need access to cameras and recordings have a limited bandwidth connection back to the campus. Salient’s Dynamic Resolution Scaling automatically scales the resolution at the server to match the client requesting the video stream. This ensures that users get the best quality video without wasting any network bandwidth.
“Dynamic resolution scaling makes a big difference on reducing network costs and preserving available bandwidth, especially in our locations where network availability is low and additional bandwidth can get expensive,” says Cornett.
The CompleteView Web Client in particular has been a “game changer” for UKPD and has reduced UKPD administrative work in adding new users and permissions to the system after only a few months of use.
“Our dispatchers, detectives and our records group were all able to switch over to the Web Client without any issue whatsoever,” Cornett says. “Once we set somebody up, we send them instructions on how to access the system, and they’re good to go because they can get to it from any web browser. It’s been a huge timesaver for us.”
The Web Client has also made issuing and revoking permissions much easier. As the threat of cyberattacks increases the need for stronger cybersecurity, being able to easily manage access is critical.
The Salient system allows administrators to grant personnel permissions, ranging from view-only privileges to being able to review recorded footage based on specific amounts of time and other criteria.
UKPD can also add a user on the fly, quickly getting them up and running without having to navigate additional steps, such as figuring out how to get admin rights to their machine, get it installed, get it locked down and then get it working again.
“It gives us different levels of security and protection of what we have on campus and what our end users can do,” Brown says.