Background
Black Box EMEA recently was called upon to deploy a challenging project with an established European Police Department.
The Department consists of 15 local police stations and employs over 14,000 front-line policing staff working hard to protect citizens and ensure law and order are maintained in its country. Each police station has a dedicated control centre which handles day-to-day police business and responds to both local and regional emergency calls.
Challenge
One of the larger district stations houses a main control centre and provides the first response to over 400 emergency and 600 non-emergency calls on a daily basis.
Constantly monitoring this amount of incoming traffic was proving to be quite a challenge, so the Department approached Black Box to provide a video wall and non-IP based KVM solution which would help police operating staff determine priority calls, share information efficiently and boost reaction speeds to incoming alerts.
As the pilot site for the rest of the district, the solution had to utilise existing cabling and also be easily replicated in the other police stations. Ease of operation was also an important factor so that users would not have to learn a new setup each time they transfer from one police station to another.
Black Box has a long and established relationship with the IT team at the Police Department. Their IT-Project Managers are frequently updated on the latest Black Box products and technologies and previously asked Black Box to install a video wall controller within the station.
The first phase of the project was to set up a mini replica of a police control centre to build, test and simulate different scenarios and find the right technology for the police station’s application.
The result of this was a solution combining an NEC 55“ LED Video wall with a Black Box DKM FX 8 Matrix and an additional remote control touch panel. The DKM FX 8 Matrix provides flexible and super-fast crosspoint switching of Full HD video in KVM applications.
Within the police station the installed solution consists of eight control desks, each with four 27 inch screens with built-in speakers, one keyboard/mouse and one remote control touch panel. Everything is hooked up with HDMI and there are two satellite receivers attached to the DKM so everyone can monitor TV at their desks.
Results
Having adopted Black Box’s solution, the police control centre staff are now able to personalise the alerts they receive according to priority using different colours and sounds, which provide a better understanding of the type of incident and the response needed.
Furthermore they also save time with minor systematic duties, being able to open and close doors and gates remotely by using Black Box’s remote control touch panel.
The solution has enabled the police department to react more effectively when responding to disturbances of law and order, and public safety. The police department are now rolling out the solution to the other stations within the region.
