Cedar Park PD Selects Integrated Bodycams (See in Action, Video)

The City Council of Cedar Park, Texas has voted unanimously to appropriate funding to provide the Cedar Park Police Department with new body-worn cameras designed to work seamlessly as a single system with the department’s new in-car video camera system.

The integrated system is manufactured by Texas-based WatchGuard, a leading provider of mobile video solutions for law enforcement.

“What this does is allows us to capture everything in an integrated, easily-searchable way and gives us a more streamlined way to be in compliance as it relates to keeping our video evidence together, making it easily retrievable and transmittable to the county attorney and district attorney offices,” said Cedar Park Chief of Police Sean Mannix.

“It’s really one-stop shopping. Everything is contained, and it’s contained into the same evidence management software that becomes easily searchable.”

The WatchGuard integrated system allows the 4RE® HD Panoramic in-car and VISTA® WiFi HD body-worn cameras to intelligently collaborate, simultaneously capturing an incident from multiple vantage points, ensuring the entirety of the scene is available for review and analysis.

(WatchGuard’s VISTA is the highest quality body worn camera on the market today. It integrates with the our #1 selling in-car video system to provide agencies with the ability to capture the whole truth in an incident. Record-After-the-Fact continually buffers video, so an agency can go back in time to retrieve video, even if the officer was unable to press the record button. Courtesy of WatchGuard Video and YouTube. Posted on Apr 27, 2015.)

When any camera in the system initiates a recording, the other cameras automatically sense a change in status and may begin recording based upon a configuration of pre-set criteria.

Playback of captured video is synchronized in the Evidence Library 4 Web evidence management system and can be viewed simultaneously, hearing audio from the body camera while viewing video from the in-car system.

“The prosecutor’s office is going to love it for being able to link and sync multiple videos at one time,” said City Council Member Michael Guevara.

WatchGuard’s evidence management system allows agencies to use a secure cloud account to temporarily share copies of digital evidence files with prosecutors, investigators or anyone with an email address.

Files can be assigned an expiration date for sharing and audit trails are created instantly and updated each time a file is uploaded, shared, viewed or shared again.

“Four vendors were engaged to develop and test their products in the field for one month each,” said Steve Smith, Cedar Park Interim Director of Information Services.

“That month was spent with officers in the field utilizing the product daily in their work activities. After evaluating the results and compiling the recommendations of field officers, WatchGuard was the one with the highest rating.”

WatchGuard products include in-car video systems and body-worn cameras along with evidence management software.

The company’s solutions increase transparency and accountability, improve trust between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve, reduce agency liability and advance the judicial process.