The City Council of Raleigh, North Carolina recently voted unanimously for the city manager to execute the necessary agreements to proceed with an implementation program providing the Raleigh Police Department with body-worn cameras and mobile vehicle recording equipment manufactured by WatchGuard, a provider of mobile video solutions for law enforcement.

The agreement will allow the department to outfit over 600 officers with WatchGuard’s Vista Wi-Fi HD body-worn cameras and 450 vehicles with WatchGuard’s 4RE HD Panoramic in-car camera system. Using WatchGuard’s patent-pending technology, the body-worn and in-car cameras will operate seamlessly as a single integrated system, capturing synchronized video of an incident from multiple vantage points.

“One thing that was very important on the front-end … was the integration of the body-worn camera with the in-car digital system,” said Raleigh Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown. “What I did not want as chief was a product that could not talk to another product.”

When any camera in a WatchGuard integrated system initiates a recording, the other cameras in the system automatically sense a change in status and begin recording based on a configuration of pre-set criteria. All recordings from the incident are automatically linked and can be viewed simultaneously using synchronized video playback in WatchGuard’s evidence management system.

“Raleigh is among a growing group of agencies that has taken a measured look at its mobile video policing strategy and determined bigger gains towards public transparency can be achieved through an integrated video system versus a stand-alone body-worn or in-car system,” said Steve Coffman, WatchGuard President and COO. “The more ‘witnesses’ on scene, the better for the agency and the public.”