County to upgrade courthouse cameras

By KURT NESBITT

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- Big Brother can find you a little more easily now that the Brown County Courthouse is putting in a new security camera system.

Finding the current system somewhat inadequate, Brown County commissioners unanimously approved a security camera system upgrade and addition for most of the Brown County Jail and Law Enforcement Center.

The system is expected to cost $19,255, for which the Brown County Sheriff's Department will foot most of the bill. Additional funding is expected to come from the state and the county's capital improvement fund.

The proposal, made by Sheriff Larry Pederson and Jail Administrator Paul Wieland, comes after a private firm toured the courthouse in April. The firm, Reliance Telephone, Inc., of East Grand Forks, Minn., identified problems with the existing camera system and made recommendations for an upgrade.

The entire courthouse and law enforcement center complex, located on Center St. in between State and Washington Streets, has about 24 cameras in place already, located mainly inside and outside the Brown County Jail. The new system will increase that number to 36 cameras and add two digital video recorders.

"This is one thing that's come up," Wieland told Brown County commissioners Tuesday afternoon. "The current system is a mess at best."

The proposal was the first action brought to the Brown County Board by the newly-established Courthouse Security Committee, which was established after Sept. 11. Court administrator Carol Melick, a committee member, said the plans are the result of a survey done by the committee to learn about security issues within the courthouse and law enforcement center.

In that survey, Brown County employees working at the courthouse identified security issues they saw with the building and its current security system.

Melick said one key issue that the survey brought to the committee's attention was surveillance of the courthouse entrance on State Street. She said some employees felt that monitoring the door and the stairwell might help in deciding how to handle certain situations that escalate into security issues, specifically after divorce and child protection hearings end. The State Street entrance is directly adjacent to the courthouse elevator, which is where many of such disputes begin and end.

"I think it was a good decision," said Melick of the vote. "I think we need more accountability and to protect staff. We can anticipate problems before they escalate."

As it currently stands, the both the Brown County Courthouse and Law Enforcement Center have 24 cameras between them. Most of those are inside the Brown County Jail and around its perimeter, although two security cameras are already found in the hallway outside the court administrator's office on the third floor of the courthouse.

The proposal passed Tuesday will upgrade older equipment currently in use in the jail and will add cameras in the hallway between the jail and the third-floor courtroom, in the actual third-floor courtroom, outside the first-floor information desk and the first-floor courtroom. It will also add a monitor inside the court administrator's office. Two cameras already exist outside that office at both ends of the hallway.

The board decided to nix another option that would have added a camera on the second floor because it felt that level saw enough traffic so that a camera wasn't necessary. A seventh option to put a camera in the dispatch lobby, which Reliance had proposed, wasn't even considered as commissioners didn't think it was necessary either.

"I think it makes more sense than having extra staff or a metal detector," said Brown County District Court Judge John R. Rodenberg to the board Tuesday. "It's the most efficient use of the money. There are several examples of how beneficial this can be because there are lots of circumstances for people to have contact (in a confrontational way)."

Funding for the upgrade and addition will come mainly from the 2002 budgets of the sheriff's department and the jail. Together, they will contribute about $13,000. The court administrator's office was able to secure $2,000 from the state to fund the cameras and monitor for the two courtrooms. Approximately $800 from the county's capital improvement fund is going toward the project and $3,860 is being borrowed ahead on money made off inmate phone calls for 2003, according to a letter Pederson sent to County Administrator Charles Enter on May 1.

Reliance Telephone outlined what it felt the current system's problems were in a letter it sent to Wieland dated April 18.

The letter said the focus of the current problem is with the cameras, monitors and switchers that are within and between the center's dispatch room and the jail control. The switchers are designed to give a camera picture of a door before it is opened.

But the current camera system has poor picture quality on most of the monitors and suffers from horizontal control problems, a problem that Reliance told Wieland was coming from the switchers, which weren't properly closing the video circuit, the letter said.

Problems were also found within the video monitors themselves. Many of the monitors have cathode ray tubes that have phosphor burned from their fronts, which create permanent ghost images on the screens, said the letter.

"The original monitors are 8 years old and are being used past their expected life," said the letter.

Reliance recommended having all the camera cables terminate in one location in order to eliminate looping cable problems. It also suggested replacing the switchers with digital video recorders, which it said would provide all camera video to both the jail and the dispatch room on two color monitors in each location. The recorders are expected to deliver live monitoring from any desk and will allow playback of information on computer workstations.

"It was just time," explained Melick. "So we looked at how to tie it in. They were upgrading the old systems and we just decided to add on to it. It wasn't any specific thing, although we have had occasions where we don't know what's going on in the hallway because we can't see."