Campus Police at the University of Illnois Urbana-Champaign are responsible for public safety in over 286 buildings housing 17 colleges and instructional units, covering over 1,400 acres and over 53,000 students.  The university is also home to 14 major sporting facilities.  In addition to day to day academics, the University hosts the largest Greek community in the US.  The 55 member campus police mission, of course, is to keep students, faculty, staff and visitors safe throughout their time at the University.  

With the sheer size of their mission, it is no surprise that the progressive organization was looking for a way to provide real time, reliable video surveillance to all of their officers and personnel.

“It is important to campus safety for our officers to have a presence during regular school days and evenings, as well as major events on campus,” said Detective Tim Hetrick. “Our goal is to always be in a position to respond to threats to public and individual safety.”

Cameras and Technology

Chief Barbara O’Connor quickly realized that in order to best serve the needs of this large campus that the security system needed to be centralized.  By utilizing Axis Communication cameras and Milestone XProtect Corporate VMS, the campus police are able to manage all cameras in a central location.  Future plans include a gradual three to five year deployment of roughly 4500 cameras.

Once the centralized system began to take shape, Chief O’Connor and Detective Tim Hetrick needed a way to take that video surveillance to mobile devices.  This is when the university added iRa C3 from Lextech Labs to iPod touches that are provided to the officers while on patrol.  Through a donation to the university, the campus police department started using the iRa C3 software at the beginning of this school year.  

“Installation of the C3 client was quick and painless,” said Detective Hetrick.  “And it amounts to about 1% of the total investment of video equipment on campus,” added Chief O’Connor.