Floridian city standardizes on Genetec Security Center for expansive surveillance and access control upgrades

Located between Tampa and Orlando, the City of Lakeland is home to just over 100,000 residents, and the surrounding Lakeland-Winter Haven area, known as Polk County is home to a population of over 600,000 people. While surveillance efforts had been initiated to keep citizens safe, the City of Lakeland was dealing with many different disparate analog and DVR systems. In 2004, the water utility department first began the search to upgrade its video surveillance systems. With buy-in from city board members and the IT department, the water utility department moved forward with Genetec Omnicast IP video surveillance system.
 
Three years later, the city’s IT department initiated a city-wide expansion project which would expand the system across all other local organizations, and upgrade to IP access control in various buildings. After much deliberation, the City of Lakeland chose to standardize on Genetec Security Center, the unified security platform which includes video surveillance, access control and automatic license plate recognition systems in one solution.
 
Security Center is currently installed at 53 sites throughout the City of Lakeland. These sites include waste and water facilities, police and fire departments, city hall, libraries, park and recreation buildings, public works facilities, the regional airport and others. Omnicast and Synergis, the video surveillance and access control systems within Security Center, are managing a total of 650 cameras and over 450 doors, respectively.
 
The City of Lakeland chose Axis network cameras in the majority of locations, as well as Axis video encoders for analog to IP conversion. HID Global V-100 and V-2000 controllers were chosen to get the 450 doors onto the network. All systems are connected to the city’s fiber network, streaming video and access control data back to centralized archiving. As per Florida laws, video and data are kept for a minimum of 30 days.