The Challenge: Facing budget constraints and unprecedented challenges amid the pandemic, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office needed a flexible and reliable solution for filling monitoring gaps across all kinds of emergency operations needs.
The Results: From thwarting car burglaries to streamlining traffic flow at vaccination sites to protecting health department resources, LiveView Technologies’ mobile surveillance units have helped Utah officials boost security across a broad range of environments and events.
As the Emergency Manager with the Utah County Sheriff’s Office, Sergeant Peter Quittner is laser-focused on preparing for any possible emergency. But even he couldn’t have imagined the challenges of the past year. In addition to creating new health and safety concerns for law enforcement personnel, the pandemic generated impromptu high-traffic events, like testing and vaccination clinics, and prompted new kinds of community threats and criminal activity.
Through it all, Quittner said, LiveView Technologies’ (LVT) video surveillance systems have been like “another set of eyes in the sky.”
“As emergency managers, we’re all about preparedness. We hope the big one never comes, but we’re trying to be prepared if it does,” he said. “I spend the time looking for resources that can help the law enforcement agencies we support. And when I can find resources that I can put out into the community to fill a need, that just gets me excited.”
24/7 monitoring that fills gaps and stretches resources
In his role, Quittner sources and supplies emergency management solutions and equipment to approximately 25 cities throughout Utah County through Emergency Management and law enforcement partners across the county. Whether they need extra personnel for crowd control at a major event or help investigating a string of burglaries in a given area, the agencies turn to Quittner’s team for extra problem-solving support, insights and technology.
A few years ago, after touring the LVT facility in Orem, UT, Quittner purchased a couple of units for the county. At the time, he didn’t have a specific challenge in mind, but knew the technology had the potential to help county law enforcement agencies maximize the impact of their teams.
“We were trying to be proactive. We like to provide better for our citizens and are always looking for new ways to do that,” he said. “I was really impressed with the technology in Orem. And I thought it could help fill monitoring gaps. Manpower is expensive-when you think of the cost of bringing someone in, training them and supplying them with equipment and a vehicle. But if you have an extra set of eyes, you can fill those gaps and do it 24 hours a day, without a break.”
Flexible deployment for all environments
Since bringing the LVT Units to Utah County, Quittner’s team has deployed them across a broad range of environments and events. During the presidential primary season, they set up LVT surveillance systems at two different drive-through voting locations with on-site health facilities. In cooperation with the National Guard, the county’s law enforcement agencies were responsible for monitoring these facilities 24/7. The LVT Units provided round-the-clock remote monitoring, as well as the ability for monitors to warn any potential trespassers via connected speakers.
When the county started rolling out COVID-19 vaccines earlier this year, Quittner deployed LVT Units to two major, high-throughput mass vaccination sites. A sudden influx of people could have easily overwhelmed the clinics, as well as the businesses and parking lots close by, Quittner said. But with LVT’s video surveillance, officials were able to keep real-time tabs on traffic flow and divert drivers as needed.
“We could have had 10,000 people show up in a day, so we needed to monitor the situation closely. And we did that from a remote emergency operations center,” said Quittner. “That’s where these camera systems come in handy.”
At one site, LVT cameras helped remote monitors identify a car thief and alert local officials.
“We were preoccupied inside the facility. We were just running our guts out trying to make sure we could keep up with the demand. We didn’t have the manpower to be out in the parking lot,” said Quittner. “And we had a report of an individual trying to burglarize vehicles. But we could pull it up on our system, say ‘there he is, this is what he looks like’ and call our local law enforcement partners in the area. So we were able to rectify that situation pretty quickly.”
Simple set-ups built for scale
At a time when law enforcement personnel are in high demand, Quittner said, LVT’s system offers another helpful advantage: simple set up. Instead of deploying trained law enforcement professionals, Quitter’s team trained volunteers to assemble the camera systems on different sites. That, he said, let trained personnel keep their focus on the demands that needed their skill sets the most.
“We do some initial training and then when we have a request come in, we send out our volunteer organizations to set up the cameras,” he said. “That doesn’t take us away from what we have to do. It’s tremendously valuable for us.”
Impact that makes the difference
And the extra surveillance support can make all the difference when it comes to keeping communities safe.
One of the sites that requested the support of Quittner’s team was a special needs facility. Not only did they have a problem with unauthorized people entering the premises, they were concerned that some of the facility’s clients were wandering too far from the property. With LVT’s cameras, he said, they were able to identify the key safety challenges and implement new protective measures that kept residents safely within the property’s limits-and kept trespassers out.
For the manager of the facility, who had already been pushed to the limits because of the pandemic, the surveillance data was game-changing.
“She was very emotional about our ability to help her-that we would go out of our way to help one single facility in one city in the county,” he said. “I think it really touched her that we were able to deploy our resources to her small piece of the puzzle that encompasses Utah County. That was special.”
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