A large scale CCTV surveillance scheme said to rank in size to a large town centre scheme was set up in Bournemouth for the political party conferences. Dorset Police deployed fixed and PTZ cameras covering arterial routes and road intersections as well as installation at cliff top and roof top sites to create a ‘secure’ conference zone for the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party Conferences.

Staffed 24hrs a day by police officers and staff, the temporary system’s control room, management and recording system used X250 system keyboards, a Tesseract SM switching matrix, text overlay, protocol converters and alarm interface units supplied by Synectics.

Andy Sims, Dorset Police CCTV planner commented, “ This was a particularly difficult installation, as the entire system had to be operational to very strict deadlines. “It was clear from the trials that there would be a major benefit in making the switch from analogue, to a digital recording system; with its enhanced speed of search compared to traditional VCR tape. It also relieved us of any time-consuming tape management issues.”