As the Surveillance Director for the Eastern Shawnees' "Bordertown Casino", I inherited a system with inadequate equipment and a department that had no training program in place. The agents had no idea what basic strategy was; report writing was done by hand and was very dismal.

The CCTV system relied on 19 Toshiba DVRs that were not designed to be used in a gaming environment. Hard drive failures were a weekly occurrence and the DVRs would dump time randomly. We could not maintain seven days of continuous recording as dictated by the NIGC.

Another problem we faced was that we had two different operating systems being used. Some DVRs used Windows XP and some used Windows 2000, and they would not communicate with each other. We had to burn our video at the individual DVR; they were not networked together.

All in all it was a very inefficient design and we were not in compliance with this system. Most of our time and energy was spent in trying to keep the DVRs operating and playing "musical chairs" with our camera cables whenever a DVR went down. My agents and supervisors were getting very frustrated with the way things were.

In March of 2007 we received an NIGC advisory bulletin outlining their recommendations for a surveillance system. The CIF rates, retention time, frames per second and an authenticating "watermark" were all discussed. Our system at that time did not meet any of the recommendations. For our DVRs to comply with these new recommendations for recording and retention, we would have had to remove 12 of the 16 cameras on each DVR unit. This would have required me to purchase an additional 57 DVRs as well as the support equipment. Not only did I not have the budget for this, but I also didn't have the room. Finally, the existing DVRs did not utilize a "watermark", so we still would not have met that part of the recommendations.

Since my surveillance vendor at that time had no other suggestions for me, I informed him that I would look for equipment and support elsewhere. He got upset and stopped supporting us altogether. Over the next year I researched several systems, met with many vendors and salesmen and learned more about CCTV than I ever thought possible. In this article I will address the things I did right and the things I did that were not so right. I hope my experiences can help someone during their search for a system upgrade or replacement.