St. John's News

St. John’s University has improved campus security by installing advanced video technology, a digital system that captures movement on tape that can be stored and reviewed easily. With video security cameras providing surveillance of the Queens, Staten Island, Manhattan and Rome campuses, Public Safety is able to “keep its finger on the pulse” of comings and goings at St. John’s 24 hours per day, without being intrusive. Since the system is computerized and incidents can be located and reviewed quickly without disrupting the flow of new data, everyone who frequents the campus can be assured that surveillance security is comprehensive, efficient and uninterrupted. The improvements also benefit other St. John’s campuses with surveillance security, which now has the capability of being monitored from the main campus.

The eight-month-old upgraded security system is a resounding success, says Thomas Lawrence, vice president for public safety, who shared some of its features with security officials from other colleges at a Campus Security Symposium held here on November 16. The program included a tour of St. John’s Public Safety offices, where security guards monitor campus activity on multiple flat-screen monitors. The new technology enables them to reprogram the surveillance monitors to highlight areas on campus of most interest or activity at various times.

“We did not choose to replace the old system to correct any security problem,” says Lawrence, “as we were already a safe campus.” However, applying new technology to an existing system that needed work, would enable the security officers to monitor the campus more effectively, both Public Safety and Information Technology Departments here on campus agreed. 

It seems only fitting that St. John’s -- which for the second year in a row is ranked in Intel’s Top 10 “Most Unwired College Campuses” (the only private university in the New York area to do so) -- should embrace cutting-edge digital surveillance, says Joe Tufano, St. John’s chief information officer. “With every incoming [undergraduate] student receiving an IBM Think Pad, we’ve had to make the campus wireless.” This wireless capability enabled the University to implement advanced video technology, he explained.

Also helpful in implementing the project was a $75,000 grant from New York State Homeland Security for parking lot cameras and gate cameras that track license plates on cars as they enter or leave campus.

The security upgrade reflected a close working relationship between Public Safety and Information Technology, says Walter Kerner, director of the University’s Network Services. “Reviewing videotapes to find incidents had been a slow process, so we put in software that put digitized video into a searchable format. Now incidents can be reviewed quickly.”

St. John’s turned to IBM for a network-based integrated digital video system using both existing and new cameras. The system uses intelligent software from Insight Video Net, coupled with IBM’s storage and server. “The St. John’s campus was secure,” says Rafail Portnoy, principal, IBM Global Services, “but it [the security system] needed to be made more efficient.” As “the world’s leading and largest networking and information technology systems integrator,” IBM offered “a complete, integrated systems solution, including design and implementation.”

The cameras now connect to digital encoders which turn the analog video signal into a data stream that travels on the University’s network to a new state-of-the-art data center, where it is stored on file servers. Officers in the Command Center can then access the data through the network. Software that detects motion makes it easy to find events or to “bookmark” events and retrieve them later. The software system can be easily reconfigured and has ad hoc surveillance capability for coverage of special events.

IBM had experience implementing similar systems – network-based advanced digital surveillance -- in 40 New York City public schools, and for clients as diverse as the Beijing Traffic Police Bureau and the city of Detroit.

The public is becoming more accepting of video surveillance,” says Lieutenant Pat Devlin, of the New York Police Department’s Counter- Terrorism Unit, who also spoke at the conference. “Cameras in the City of London and in the subway system enabled the terrorists who struck there last summer to be identified within 24 hours. Londoners are depicted on surveillance tape about 400 times per day.”

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Officials from about 20 colleges attended the security conference:  Hofstra, New York University, New York Institute of Technology, Pace, Touro, Sacred Heart (Fairfield, CT), SUNY Maritime, Old Westbury and Purchase, Stony Brook University,  Mercy College, Monroe College, Suffolk County Community College, Rockland Community College, St. Joseph’s College, Community College of Philadelphia, Dominican College and Housatonic Community College.