Live View: Body-Worn Camera for Security Guards

Something's kicking off on site and the guard's radio call only gets you half the picture. By the time a written report lands, whatever the dispatcher needed to see in the moment is long over.

What most firms do today

A phone call to the office, or a body-worn camera that records locally and only gets watched back after the shift, once whatever was happening is already resolved. Either way, the person who could send help doesn't see anything until it's history.

How TacDesk's Live View works

The guard starts it, not the dispatcher. Live View turns a guard's phone into a body camera for a live incident: they open it in the TacDesk app and tap to start. Nothing records or streams before that. A dispatcher can send a request asking a guard to start their camera, but that only raises a prompt on the guard's phone; it can't switch the camera on for them. A guard can mute audio mid-recording too, the video keeps running and the dispatcher sees a banner showing it's muted, rather than the feed just going quiet with no explanation.

It streams to the dispatcher grid while it records. Once running, video and audio go up in short segments to a live viewer built for Dispatcher Mode at 1080p, so a dispatcher watching the grid sees the feed arrive close to real time rather than waiting for a file afterwards. Sessions are meant to be short and deliberate, for an active incident, not a shift-long recording. The upload is rate-limited and validated segment by segment, so a patchy signal degrades the feed rather than breaking it outright, and the dispatcher's screen shows the session as live or queued depending on how the segments are actually arriving.

A high-quality master copy is kept too. Alongside the live segments, TacDesk uploads a single verified master copy of the recording afterwards, checked for completeness, so the footage that gets kept as evidence is the full-quality version, not just the streaming feed.

It lands in the same footage library as everything else. A Live View recording is stored and treated like any other clip in Footage Management: it can be linked to a report, and it follows the same rules on client visibility, nothing is shown to a venue client unless a manager deliberately releases it.

Why it matters

A dispatcher can act on what's happening, not what already happened. Live View exists to close the gap between an incident starting and someone with the full picture being able to send help or make a call, on top of what dispatch already gets from real-time GPS tracking.

It stays a decision the guard makes. The guard controls when their camera is on, which matters for a device that's recording video and audio of them and whoever they're dealing with, not something switched on remotely without their say-so.

The evidence doesn't stop at the stream. Because a full-quality master is uploaded and verified afterwards, what a dispatcher watched live during the incident isn't the only copy: there's a proper file to hand to a client or the police once the moment has passed, not just a memory of what the grid showed.

Where it sits

Live View needs Dispatcher Mode to work at all, since the feed has nowhere to render without a dispatcher grid to show it on. It's included on TacCommand and a paid add-on on TacStarter and TacPro. TacPro already includes Dispatcher Mode; on TacStarter you'd add Dispatcher Mode as well. It isn't available on TacFree. See the pricing page for current add-on prices, and read about the dispatcher grid it streams into on our real-time GPS tracking page.

Start free to get guards and sites set up on TacDesk, or book a demo to see Live View streaming into a dispatcher grid.