Client:
City of Glendale

Project Duration:
February 2018 to December 2019

Firm Role:
Prime

Contract Value:
$450,000

The Glendale City Jail is the third-busiest Type I facility in the County of Los Angeles, booking approximately 500 to 700 persons each month. The facility needed to upgrade its security system to meet current and future needs while maximizing the existing infrastructure. BSI provided project management and design-build services to deliver a complete replacement of the Jail Control System for the Glendale Police Department

BSI’s main responsibilities included:

• Upgrading the jail’s video management system, touchscreen/programmable logic controller, access control system, and the video visitation system.
• Installing and integrating more than 200 cameras
• Replacing equipment, hardware, and software with a solution that is fully integrated with existing systems.
• Systems integration with existing systems (including fire alarms), cabling and low-voltage infrastructure, touchscreen PLC assessment, SCADA analysis, design, hardware and software replacement, and new intercom and duress system
• Designing a comprehensive, scalable solution, optimized for the jail environment, that meets the city’s critical requirements.
• Project management, network troubleshooting and cyber security coordination, commissioning & activation, lab testing, training, maintenance and repair, programming and configuration, database migration, equipment procurement, and overall implementation
• Comprehensive, integrated solution to meet the jail’s unique needs.

In the process of conducting this project, we began with a planning phase that consisted of site assessment, design finalization, project plan completion, and client approval. Our engineers surveyed the site conditions and analyzed the jail’s existing security platforms. We coordinated with stakeholders to gather functional requirements of new CCTV systems, including gap analysis of current coverage of existing cameras for field of view (FOV), resolution, and frames-per-second (FPS). BSI examined network coordination, timing constraints for actions, personnel credentialing for access, the parallel operations of the video management system and console, and the current PLC codes.

Based on this assessment and stakeholder coordination, BSI determined that new features and system upgrades, such as motion detection and crossline detection, were needed to maximize the digital/IP cameras’ benefits for the jail. After receiving client approval and procuring long-lead items (servers, switches, storage/VMS) and other infrastructure systems, we set up a lab environment to begin site installation, training, and testing.

The biggest challenge with the Glendale Jail replacement project was the multitude of legacy systems that the new central control system needed to work with and retro-commission for integrated operations. Several of these legacy systems and infrastructure were in a state of disrepair which posed serious challenges during the retro-commissioning process. Some of
these are summarized below.

Issue # 1. Wall Duress PLC Communication:
Some of the wall duress alarms, when triggered in the field, were not being released by one of the legacy (Omron) PLC system as incoming input signals to the OSSI Driver. Upon rebooting the Omron PLC Driver, the pending alarms started populating in the OSSI Alarm Queue automatically all at once. The network bandwidth traffic prevented the successful passage of these input duress signals from the PLC System to the OSSI System. Since the network is managed by the city and thus a 3rd party dependency, the team provided the requirements for network redesign and in the meantime are manually monitoring and clearing these alarms.

Issue # 2. Harding Intercom System CDROM and Duress Audibles:
During our initial investigations, we found that the Harding DXI Intercom System was not able to page and play duress message. To find the root cause of the problem, we traced the audio output to PAB boards, and found faults on the main and backup, as well as observed no output. Based on the discovery, BSI’s technical team recommended replacing the PAB boards. One PAB replacement board was installed which cleared the faults, and it was determined that the backup PAB board no longer needed to be replaced. Paging function was restored due to this effort, but the duress alarms were still not audible so BSI troubleshot the audio pathway. Bypassing the CD-ROM helped verify that ‘normal’ audio traffic was passing through, however not from the CD-ROM itself. The CD-ROM drive ‘audio out’ was determined to be defective. After it was determined that a new drive would not be compatible with the old paging system, a replacement legacy CD-ROM drive was procured which would be compatible with the legacy Harding paging software. This solution solved the problem and duress paging was made functional again with the messages on the paging CD.

Issue # 3. Paging system Faulty Hard Drive:
Another issue that occurred with the paging system was a full hard disk failure. For this issue, the team determined that root cause of the problem and identified that the system could continue to operate on its backup server node. To fix the issues, BSI replaced the faulty hard drive and configured it with the operating system and intercom software. Then, the system’s operation was tested and the problem was found to be resolved to meet the client’s expectations.

“Based on my experience with BSI, I honestly have to say that their capability is only limited by one’s imagination. Our punch list and expectations were very high and they were able to explore solutions which not only were cost effective for us but did not compromise quality or performance”
– Juan Lopez, Jail Administrator

“BSI’s engineers are able to effectively evaluate current operating systems and propose a cost-effective and efficient solution for updated software and hardware integration. I recommend the BSI brand as a viable, reliable and upcoming leader of effective and efficient law enforcement and correctional security systems”
– Juan Lopez, Jail Administrator