United States. Located approximately 30 miles southwest of Los Angeles, the Torrance Unified School District is home to approximately 24,000 students from kindergarten through high school. Torrance USD has 34 school sites spanning elementary, middle and high schools. They are linked by three preschool, continuation and community day schools.
Violent crime and other offenses are an inescapable reality for U.S. schools and their students. During the 2013-14 school year, 65 percent of public schools [Source: U.S. Department of Education] recorded one or more violent incidents, representing an estimated total of 757,000 incidents. This figure translates to a rate of approximately 15 crimes per 1,000 students enrolled in 2013–14.
While Torrance is among the safest cities in Los Angeles County, its schools face the same challenges as other academic institutions. As with all school systems, TUSD has an obligation to maintain the safety and well-being of students, as well as campus staff and visitors. Along with violent assault, other key concerns include robbery, trespassing, vandalism and graffiti, along with the need to maintain a visible deterrent against criminal activity.
To date, the Torrance Unified School District had relied on some ad hoc facilities in a few schools that were poorly planned and did not have consistent standards in place. Poor camera positioning and below-standard image quality, especially in low-light conditions, meant that perpetrators were often not successfully identified. This severely limited the ability of schools to resolve incidents and serve as an effective deterrent against other incidents.
In addition to physical attacks and theft, schools in the district routinely reported cases of vandalism to the cameras themselves. As an added challenge, the heat and dust of Southern California's climate placed even more vigorous demands on the reliable performance of existing analog cameras in the Torrance Unified School District.
To benefit from significantly improved watch image quality, as well as increased reliability and lower ownership costs, the Torrance Unified School District chose to rethink its security camera strategy.
In total, the district has installed approximately 1,100 Sony video security cameras in 34 schools. All cameras have been supplied and installed by the NIC integrator, along with a network video management solution provided by OpenEye. Most of the cameras are Sony's SNC-EM632RC and SNC-VB632D rugged minidome model and bullet cameras, which offer Full HD image quality in all weather and lighting conditions.
The highly sensitive Exmor CMOS image sensor and powerful IPELA Engine EX processing engine can face severe backlight conditions, where light and shadow extremes in the same scene often pose problems for other cameras. As a bonus, built-in IR (infrared) lighting provides a clear picture of suspicious people and incidents in total darkness conditions.
Robust and reliable cameras are widely deployed in all outdoor areas of each school campus, including social and sports areas, as well as parking lots. Since the initial installation in 2015, Sony's cameras have worked perfectly, with NO OPERATIONAL ISSUES REPORTED BY IT and SECURITY STAFF.
The installation of the cameras has had an immediate and measurable effect on student safety. Suspensions for violence and assault have been greatly reduced, while the incidence of guns on campus has been reduced by more than 40%. In addition, the presence of the cameras serves to reassure students and staff, while acting as a powerful deterrent against criminal activity.
