Making Coordination with Law Enforcement More Convenient
If you’re from the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, then you hold a full-blooded faith in one of the Commonwealth’s institutions—Sheetz or Wawa.
These two beloved convenience stores maintain a cult following in their respective territories. The love for these places has spawned debates and a rivalry between fans that merits its own Wikipedia entry, an urban legend, and plenty of growth for both companies beyond the state’s lines.
Sheetz has expanded its presence and offerings of food, gas, and other roadside services to more than 750 store locations across seven U.S. states: Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia.
To help support these locations, Sheetz’s security operations center (SOC) monitors and manages incident response, alarms, two-way audio, access control, video management systems (VMS), and surveillance cameras. Jamie Ashurst, security operations manager for the SOC, has served in every role in the center throughout the more than 20 years he’s worked for Sheetz.
Ashurst and the SOC team—more than 30 people—operate the center 24/7. Along with managing technical security support for stores, the SOC also serves Sheetz’s five corporate campuses. When a store or other site alarm or a panic button is triggered, Ashurst says SOC operators can connect to that site’s surveillance and monitoring solutions.
“We see video, we hear audio, and we can respond to that—be it a response from us or a dispatch for emergency services,” he says.
The SOC team supports hundreds of sites and regularly coordinates with law enforcement and investigators when incidents occur. But the method the team used in the past “was really old school,” Ashurst says. If law enforcement, a lawyer, investigator, or another individual requested video from a store about an incident, the security team would have to burn the footage onto a DVD and then mail it to the requesting party.
The security team processes between 1,500 to 3,500 requests a month, so Ashurst was looking to replace this onerous production with a modern solution—especially after law enforcement departments asked if the video data could be shared in a more modern fashion.
Ashurst and his team considered a few different options when they began looking for a solution. They also reached out to law enforcement departments to learn what they had encountered and approved of. But ultimately, Ashurst opted for a new solution from a familiar name: March Networks.
The Sheetz SOC team has been using at least one or more products from March Networks for more than 20 years. When Ashurst initially reached out to see if the vendor might have a more modern solution for securely transferring video data, he found that March Networks was developing Evidence Vault.
Evidence Vault is a storage and sharing platform, allowing users to export files from a recorder, local server, or computer into the cloud, where the data can be stored and managed. Once uploaded, users can control access and permissions to the data, as well as email a notification to other appropriate parties that the data is accessible.
Along with a positive existing relationship with March Networks, Ashurst adds that the solution’s security, reliability, and ease of use were reasons why the team ultimately picked Evidence Vault.
The team’s familiarity with other March Networks products also meant that installing the platform was straightforward.
“It was really easy on our part because with working with March already we had a lot of backbone already put in place,” Ashurst says. “…As far as implementation, it really was just installing the new software.”
He adds that training SOC staff on the new software was easy, too, describing it as user-friendly and intuitive. SOC leaders helped speed the learning process along by creating a training document for the rest of the team.
One of the team’s larger concerns was ensuring that this new method of sharing surveillance data would still comply with law enforcement’s standards for maintaining a chain of custody for evidence. Because any surveillance shared with law enforcement comes directly from Sheetz’s internal servers, chain of custody with Evidence Vault is maintained and confirmed.
“We’re not losing it because it’s coming from our system directly,” Ashurst says. “It’s never leaving our system until the officer downloads the video on their end.”
If the SOC team or an external investigator is looking into an incident at a site covered by the video surveillance system—whether it’s a car accident, an alarm going off, or a slip and fall—the corresponding video feed is processed by the SOC team.
Sheetz does coordinate with law enforcement for outside incidents, such as a fight breaking out between two customers in one of the stores. Following internal procedures, store personnel or a site alarm would notify the SOC team that an assault was in progress. The SOC would then process the information and alert law enforcement. Once law enforcement began investigating the incident, an officer would request to review video evidence of the fight in case the matter is taken to court.
The SOC team would then download and save any surveillance video of the fight onto a secure server before uploading it into Evidence Vault for temporary storage and management. The SOC team would then determine how long the video data needs to remain in Evidence Vault; it can be days or months before the footage is purged from the platform.
“We have our own retention policies that we hold to, but some sites are more active than others, so storage really varies,” Ashurst says.
Once Scheetz approves the officer’s video evidence request, the SOC team will email the officer to notify him or her that the video is available. It will also provide a link that allows the officer to download the video via Evidence Vault. The platform also allows the SOC team to set any necessary parameters on the video, even after it’s been shared with others outside of the SOC.
“When we send the video out, we can say an officer has seven days, 14 days, two hours—we can set the limit to be able to download that video,” Ashurst explains.
Now, instead of waiting hours for a video to be burned onto a DVD and then days to arrive by mail, fulfilling a request can take minutes or hours.
“The biggest thing it does for us is speed,” Ashurst says. “…It’s really sped up our process and made our delivery system quicker.”
For more information about Evidence Vault, contact Mike Kleinhenz, key account manager at March Networks, [email protected].
Sara Mosqueda is associate editor at Security Management. You can share your preferred Wawa order or say why you love Sheetz via email at [email protected] or connect with her on LinkedIn.
