Jan 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Mary Rose Roberts

When president-elect Barack Obama accepted his new role during an election night speech in Grant Park, one of Chicago's largest public spaces, he spoke eloquently, and hundreds of thousands listened and cheered. And after the speech, the people and the politician went their separate ways quietly, without incident.

It wasn't by sheer luck that the event unfolded without chaos or terror. Behind the scenes, the U.S. Secret Service and local Chicago Office of Emergency Management Communications (OEMC) personnel kept a close eye on who came and went. It wasn't all done by patrolling officers — a series of video surveillance systems previously placed clandestinely throughout the city's business district became the eyes and ears of law-enforcement personnel.

As executive director of the city's OEMC, Ray Orozco oversees the video surveillance program dubbed Operation Virtual Shield. He said that the transmission of video data was essential in order to protect the president-elect and revelers that night. He said the system is active throughout the city's main financial district and lakefront, as well as in a number of the city's neighborhoods.

There's a lot to think about before deploying a widespread video surveillance system in any city, but Orozco said the most important consideration is to ensure that the personnel who are on the streets and making decisions are armed with the most up-to-date information as possible. “It ultimately results in a more efficient and effective mitigation of the incident, which could result in lives saved,” he said.

In addition, the city must ensure gathered data is distributed in a usable format that doesn't result in information overload.

“They don't need to know all the back-end technology,” Orozco said. “What they need is to get the proper information in a reasonable amount of time, and that's why it's important to make sure [beat officers] are on board when you start to build, design and run the system.”

Before cameras could be installed, the city needed a network and chose IBM as the system integrator for the project. Roger Rehayem, IBM's project lead, said the city invested in a fiber-based infrastructure to connect all port devices on the street to the OEMC. Data then could be gathered and transmitted from video cameras mounted on street lights, in parks, on the lakefront and on the city's bridges to the OEMC's central command and control center.

“The initial first step that every city needs to do is to make sure they can get bandwidth to areas of interest,” he said.

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