30 Aug 2011
The city of Sanford, Florida, is located less than 30 miles northeast of Orlando and serves as the seat of Seminole County. In November 2010, the city unveiled a new 75,000 square foot public safety complex housing both Sanford's fire and police headquarters.

After evaluating the available options and considering the city's existing infrastructure and growth requirements, the city of Sanford decided that Genetec's Security Center unified security platform would be best suited to meet the facility's high-level needs. They started configuring layouts for the planned installation of Genetec's Security Center 4.0, comprising both Omnicast video surveillance and Synergis access control systems.

"Genetec's Security Center has met all of our sophisticated needs for video surveillance and access control, and afforded a few additional perks above and beyond. As an example, the ease and speed with which we can navigate video footage allows us to efficiently use our archives in an audit capacity if a concern arises about evidence handling. All the data is organised in an intuitive manner, and we can go back after the fact to track an item from the time it landed in our hands to the time it left, moment by moment, to assuage concerns or prove validity in a court of law," said Nicholas McRay, Senior Project Manager at the City of Sanford.

When construction was complete, 83 cameras were installed at the complex. Fourteen cameras, including six outdoor-ready AXIS Q6032-E Fixed Dome PTZ (pan/tilt/zoom) network cameras and eight fixed AXIS P1343-E network cameras were installed to monitor the parking lot and building exterior. The remaining 69 cameras, mostly AXIS P3343-V (vandal resistant) fixed domes, monitor the building interior in various capacities.

The Synergis system includes 78 access-controlled points covering a myriad of uses such as parking gates and sally ports for detainees. Sanford put Genetec's open and flexible access control system to the test by incorporating a number of third-party hardware integrations, including:

• duress buttons in interview rooms (HUB-M Panic Buttons), which trigger strobe light alerts (SW-P Strobe w/ LENS-B blue lens);
• microphones (Louroe Verifact A microphones); and
• alarm triggers (HID VertX® V1000s and V200/300s) connected to perimeter and rollup doors, as well as storage facilities.

Access control is provided with HID Global's PoE (Power over Ethernet) EdgeReader® ER40s, EdgePlus® E400s and Vertx® V100s.

Of all the advantages afforded by Security Center, the greatest quality it has provided Sanford is its extreme flexibility, while still providing a highly robust system.

"Security Center is a platform that can address all of Sanford's needs, allowing us to create the federated system that we now have serving several types of facilities simultaneously. We never need to cross-reference information between discrete solutions across the city - it's all tied in. It works well for us, and it suits the widely varied needs of a municipality," said Nicholas McRay.