As the San Diego Padres battled the San Francisco Giants to stay in playoff contention in their final home game of the 2004 season, tempers began to flare among some fans during the latter innings.
While most of the other 45,000 fans in attendance at PETCO Park watched the Padres going down in defeat, security personnel began to take notice of the growing commotion in the left-field grandstand. The disorder among several people quickly gave way to belligerence and then all-out fisticuffs. Police intervened and found it necessary to use pepper spray to subdue at least one of the combatants.
Ken Kawachi, director of security and transportation for the Padres, knew the police department would be requesting video from the stadium’s CCTV surveillance system for identification and visual evidence for any potential prosecution. Kawachi wasn’t optimistic he could provide the goods. In fact, without real-time recording, he was all but certain the VHS analog system failed to capture any useful footage of the conflagration’s participants.
“Going in to the 2004 season, we knew our surveillance system was very inadequate based on the advances in technology and what we needed the system to do,” Kawachi says.
An “inadequate” surveillance system may seem unacceptable for an otherwise state-of-the-art major league baseball stadium that had celebrated its grand opening in April of that year. While the front office busied itself during the off-season to reload the lineup for another playoff run in 2005, Kawachi and his department made plans of their own to come back stronger than ever with new surveillance capability. A program commenced to add and upgrade cameras over a period of time and to eventually equip the stadium with an IP-based solution that would record and play back in real-time.
Mired in Litigation, the Promise of a New Stadium Is Put on Hold
The PETCO Park project, the cornerstone of the largest downtown redevelopment project in San Diego history, was approved by voters in 1998. Fourteen lawsuits and a federal investigation prevented the city from selling hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds needed for its share of the construction of the $474 million ballpark. The city didn’t foresee the storm of controversy from using public money, which ultimately would derail construction for two years.
Purchases for the stadium, with classic architectural features not unlike Baltimore’s Camden Yards or Cleveland’s Jacobs Field, were made prematurely. Among them, a CCTV surveillance solution that was designed not long after groundbreaking in 2000. “Unfortunately, it was the system we inherited because of the delays in construction,” Kawachi says.
The stadium’s original all-Phillips (now Bosch) CCTV installation utilized four VCRs and multiplexers that recorded video from 36 cameras. “Most were fixed black-and-white. We were very limited on color p/t/z [pan/tilt/zoom] cameras,” Kawachi says. “When the system was purchased, VHS was still high-end product when it came to CCTV systems. But by the time the park opened in 2004 a lot of things were going digital.”
The brawl in the left field grandstand was just one example of the system’s shortcomings. PETCO Park management was compelled to launch an upgrade after the ’04 season.
Local Systems Integrator Selected to Overhaul Surveillance Solution
Enter Dan Brault, president of Electro Specialty Systems (ESS), a San Diego-based systems integrator.
When PETCO Park officials sought help to upgrade their near-antiquated CCTV system, they turned to Qualcomm Stadium, home of the San Diego Chargers, and former home of the Padres. Officials there recommended Brault, who had installed a CCTV solution, among other contracted stadium assignments, for the NFL in 2003 when Super Bowl XXXII was hosted at Qualcomm Stadium.
Brault, a long-time Padres season ticket holder, has operated his company for 22 years. ESS designs and installs complete solutions for fire/life-safety, video surveillance, access control and communications.
“We were familiar with his work and he came highly recommended from Qualcomm,” Kawachi says.
Brault signed on with PETCO Park in 2005 and soon began executing a tiered plan to upgrade the stadium’s CCTV solution over a four-year period. His first assignment was to begin replacing some of the dated Phillips cameras and adding Bosch p/t/z auto-domes with color day/night capability.
In all, 77 analog cameras now survey the entire exterior of the complex, stadium seating, clubhouse areas and more, including loss-theft surveillance inside the renovated 95-year-old Western Metal Supply Co., which stands near the left field foul pole. A portion of the venerable red-brick building now houses the Padres Team Store on the first floor and provides views of left field.
The second and third floors provide suites for group parties; the fourth floor features a restaurant with patio dining and great views of the field below. And on the roof, bleachers and standing space yield an uncommon perspective of the diamond 80 feet below.
Easy Installation of IP-Based System Does Away With VHS
A high point in the tiered program came prior to the 2006 baseball season. Brault’s team ripped out all of the original Phillips recording equipment from the stadium’s cramped security command center and replaced it with Bosch Security System’s IP-based VIP X1600 16-channel encoders.
Gone is a traditional management server. The VIP X1600 encoder uses iSCSI technology for storage to simplify the total video over the IP CCTV solution. The PETCO Park installation called for five of the units, each of which records up to 6 terabytes (TBs) of audio and video onto a RAID (redundant array of independent disks) 5 storage system.
“With the X1600, you record directly to the iSCSI,” Brault says. “You view and manage all of that through the Bosch software. It’s a 100-percent analog camera system. The only thing that is digital is the recording side of it.”
Brault says the installation of the new Bosch gear didn’t pose any special challenges and was completed in a couple of days. “It is such a simple thing to install if you understand the Bosch IP products. The actual implementation was pretty straightforward. We took the existing recording equipment out, cleaned up all the video cable, connected it to the encoders and connected that to our iSCSI device.”
The system upgrade now allows the stadium’s security surveillance crew to view live and play back in real-time. “Now we have the ability to quickly identify a location and clearly zoom in and record,” Kawachi says. “We’ve been able to clearly identify those subjects that trespassed onto the playing field and other incidents.”
Video Does Not Feast on Customer Network Bandwidth
Gobbling up bandwidth from the facility’s network to operate the new installation was never a concern, Brault says. With the encoders and the iSCSI in the same room, the recording never touches the customer network.
“That is one of the things we really liked about it. It means we don’t have concerns from the customer’s IT department about bandwidth usage,” Brault says. “There is no concern we are going to be interrupting the regular flow of data. And if the network fails, it doesn’t affect us. Our devices are talking to each other without the network being involved.”
The iSCSI devices and the encoders are all gigabit (GB) speed. As Brault explains it, “We basically daisychain the encoders from one to the next to the next — they all have two network ports. From the physical connection you start at the iSCSI. There is just an Ethernet cable that comes out of that to the first encoder and goes to the second encoder, the third encoder, the fourth encoder, the fifth encoder, and then the fifth encoder is connected to the customer network.”