Ten systems rejected, then five minutes tops per incident
Liberty-Perry School District in Indiana was losing footage to an unreliable recorder and losing hours to search. Its IT director on what a public district can afford, and who gets a login now.
Liberty-Perry School District, in eastern Indiana, looked at ten other camera systems before it chose one, and its IT director is candid about why the ten fell out.
We evaluated 10 other systems before Spot AI. As a public district, most of them were too costly and the technology wasn't enough to justify the cost. Spot AI gave us the opportunity to solve the issues of our old camera system and improve our processes.
That is Dale Byrge, director of information technology, in Spot AI's published account.
What was wrong
The district's old system had two failures, according to the account. Finding footage took hours, because everything needed to line up just right. And the old network video recorder was unreliable, so footage was sometimes simply lost.
Lost footage is about the worst outcome a school camera system can produce. It means the incident happened, the parents are calling, and the answer is that the recorder did not keep it.
Plugging in
The account describes setup as the first saving. The new recorder, once plugged in, found the district's installed cameras on its own, and the district says this spared its team hours of setup labour. Spot AI IP cameras were added as the district needed them.
The district says search time across its buildings went from hours a day to minutes. Byrge's own figure is tighter.
We're talking probably five minutes tops now to resolve an incident, and we've been able to add School Principals and School Resource Officers to Spot AI so that everyone can see what's happening across the district.
Who gets a login
The second half of that quote matters as much as the first. Resolving a student incident used to mean the IT department matching up camera feeds and then working out how to get the result to school staff. Now principals and school resource officers have their own access, to live feeds and to search, from wherever they are.
The effect, in the district's telling, is that IT stopped being the bottleneck, and more administrators use the cameras now that they can.
Shirt colour
One capability the district singles out is People Search: filtering footage by attributes such as shirt colour or trouser colour. In a school building the question is usually which student walked through that door at 2:15, and that is the search it answers. The account also mentions Vehicle Search and Motion Search, used to move between cameras at any location and narrow down what happened.
The claim, and its limits
Spot AI's account does not publish an incident count or a dollar figure for Liberty-Perry. The measurable claim is time: hours a day down to minutes, and five minutes tops per incident in the IT director's words. For a public district that had already rejected ten alternatives on cost, that is the number the purchase was made on. If you run IT for a district, what would yours be?