By Chris Farlow of Snap Surveillance
Bill Belichick, head football coach of the New England Patriots is known for driving home a simple philosophy: ?Do Your Job.? We all have a simple understanding of this concept. In a football sense, you have an assignment and you execute that assignment. To make this idea work, the coaching staff must have the credibility for the players to buy in. But more importantly, the coaches must hold the players accountable for not living up to the standards. This is what sets apart Belichick from other coaches.
What does that have to do with video surveillance and physical security? Just as it applies to the players on the Patriots, you have to have the right tools in your security infrastructure to do their jobs to the best of their abilities if you expect to get any true value and results out of it.
In physical security, you have access control devices, video surveillance cameras, video management software, and maybe even video analytic tools. Each of these components need to ?do their job? efficiently and effectively to produce timely and reliable results.
And then there are times when we put too much onus on the system operators to know more about the systems than is truly practical or appropriate.
Let?s use a real-world event that was also highlighted in a major motion picture. In the Mark Wahlberg movie about the Boston Marathon bombing, Patriot?s Day, there?s a scene in a warehouse where Wahlberg?s character walks back through the path the bombers would have taken and remembers which specific CCTV cameras would be in relationship to the next cameras that would have a view of the subjects.
( read more about this movie and the back story at the NY Times article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/movies/peter-berg-narrates-a-scene-from-patriots-day.html )
The movie also accurately depicts how, behind the scenes, law enforcement officials were combing through surveillance camera footage to try to find the bombers. And this is actually a perfect analogy to Belichick?s ?Do Your Job? mantra.
It was absolutely amazing how the FBI and the Boston police team recreated the crime scene along Bolyston street. They did their jobs!
The surveillance cameras recorded the video. They did their job.
The law enforcement staff reviewed hours of recorded video. They did their job.
Now, all good Hollywood movies stretch reality a bit and it is very unlikely that a single cop would realistically remember which cameras were where.
This is where Snap Surveillance?s Force Multiplier tool would do the job it was designed to do. If we look at Milestone?s Xprotect VMS as an example, Force Multiplier?s job is to efficiently and effectively bring up all of the associated cameras that are related to the current camera in focus.
This would allow the operators —as fictionalized in the Patriot?s Day movie— to easily track their subject as they move from one camera?s field of view to the next camera?s field of view no matter which way the subject moves within the scene.
That is Snap Force Multiplier?s job. And it does it extremely well.
So if you find yourself —or your team of surveillance operators— tracking objects or suspects through hundreds or thousands of cameras, draft the best player for your team and rest assured that Snap?s Force Multiplier can do its job.
Snap Surveillance?s Force Multiplier is an operator assisted tracking tool that is an add-on utility to popular VMS systems such as Milestone?s Xprotect. Watch a video on how it does its job at: https://www.snapsurveillance.com/video/
About The Author:
Chris Farlow of Snap Surveillance
Chris Farlow is North American Solutions Engineer for Snap Surveillance. Snap provides a low-cost software solution that helps turn your existing fleet of cameras into a powerful interconnected network of camera relationships. Snap enables surveillance system users of any experience to easily track live events and quickly recreate steps for forensic purposes. Designed for the 100+ enterprise camera environment, Snap Surveillance?s Force Multiplier fully integrates with a range of video management software packages.
Learn more about Snap Surveillance at SnapSurveillance.com or call 760-429-3444.