Peterborough Police Service

How Verkada Helps the Peterborough Police Service Solve High-Profile Cases Faster

Paul Notman, IT Manager

Command Cameras

Background

The Peterborough Police Service, which serves just under 100,000 residents across Peterborough, Lakefield, and Cavan Monaghan in Ontario, Canada, faces increasing pressure to provide efficient, responsive public safety services. With a lean IT team and growing demands, the Service relies on technology that empowers officers to act quickly, investigators to close cases efficiently, and administrators to manage operations seamlessly.

When Paul Notman joined as IT Manager, he brought a clear mandate: invest in modern infrastructure that supports the Service’s long-term goals of safety, transparency, and operational resilience. That led the team to Verkada.

Challenges

Shortly after stepping into his role as IT Manager, Notman was confronted with a worst-case scenario: nearly all camera footage had been lost due to a failed server migration. Despite investing tens of thousands of dollars in recovery efforts, the footage was unrecoverable. The missing data included high-priority areas which created a critical compliance risk and legal liability.

The incident exposed the fragility of the existing system and the risks of relying on a siloed, outdated infrastructure with limited customer support. The loss of critical video wasn’t the only issue facing the Peterborough Police Service. Like many modern law enforcement agencies, they were navigating a broader set of operational and community safety challenges, including:

Disconnected systems slowed investigations. The Service needed a secure, efficient way to integrate video evidence into their case workflows, particularly with platforms like Evidence.com, which plays a key role in case management and disclosure to the Crown. Their previous system lacked any built-in integrations, making the process manual and time-consuming.

Poor vendor support limited innovation. Perhaps most critically, the Service’s prior vendor ecosystem was fragmented and unresponsive. Notman described the support model as a patchwork of third-party contractors who often made issues worse rather than solving them. Without direct access to product teams or meaningful customer service, the Service was unable to innovate, expand coverage, or explore new use cases.

These limitations made it clear: Peterborough Police Service needed more than a video surveillance tool, it needed a platform to support modern policing.

"With Verkada, I sleep well at night. Knowing our video is stored directly on the camera and encrypted gives us peace of mind. We no longer have to worry about costly storage or backup failures — if a camera goes down, we don't lose all the footage." — Paul Notman, IT Manager, Peterborough Police Service

Outcomes

Solving a Homicide Within Days of Deployment

Just one week after Verkada cameras were installed across Peterborough’s downtown core, a homicide occurred. In cases like this, every minute matters. In the past, investigators would have spent days chasing down store managers, hoping they had usable footage—if the cameras were working at all. Even then, reviewing footage often meant hours of sifting through low-quality, disconnected clips with no clear timeline.

With Verkada, investigators pulled up high-definition footage within minutes. They traced the suspect’s path across multiple cameras, confirming their appearance, movements, and direction of travel. Quick access to reliable video helped the Peterborough Police Service build a timeline, rule out false leads, and move the investigation forward to where the result was the arrest and charging of an individual.

From 60 Minutes to 5: The New Evidence Disclosure Workflow

One of the biggest early wins for the Peterborough Police Service came from Verkada’s ability to integrate with Axon’s Evidence.com, the digital evidence management system routinely used by the Service to disclose prisoner booking videos. These clips must be shared with the Crown within strict legal timelines, and missing a deadline can delay proceedings or compromise a case.

Previously, fulfilling these requests was slow and resource-intensive. Each clip had to be manually downloaded (a process that could take 20 minutes or more) and then uploaded to a separate system, often quadrupling the time per request. With only one IT team member managing video for the entire Service, delays were common, and the process was frustratingly inefficient.

Now, with Verkada’s integration into Evidence.com, the disclosure process is 10x faster. Clerks and IT staff can find footage, tag it with a case number, and upload it directly from the Verkada platform. What once took over an hour now happens in under five minutes. The result is a simpler, faster, and more consistent process that ensures deadlines are met and staff can focus on higher-impact work.

“I was blown away by how agile and responsive Verkada was during the integration process. The support team is out of this world.” — Paul Notman, IT Manager, Peterborough Police Service

Building for the Future: Expanding Capabilities with Verkada

Thanks to Verkada’s flexible solutions, the Service can easily scale its camera network, integrate new technologies, and stay ahead of changing community safety needs. With the current infrastructure in place, the Service is poised to expand its capabilities.

Real-Time LPR to Help Disrupt Regional Crime Networks

Peterborough faces rising challenges tied to organized vehicle theft and human trafficking — crimes that rely on speed, coordination, and anonymity. In many car theft cases, there’s a 48-hour window before stolen vehicles are loaded into shipping containers and sent out of the country. Trafficking operations often use similar tactics, employing fast-moving convoys, rental cars, and cloned license plates that are difficult to track without the right tools.

To disrupt these operations, the Service is looking to deploy Verkada’s advanced License Plate Recognition (LPR) cameras across high-traffic corridors and key highway intersections — strategic points where suspect vehicles are likely to pass through. These cameras would give investigators real-time access to vehicle data, alerting them to plates of interest and tracking vehicle movement in real time.

But the benefits go well beyond a single plate scan:

Multi-Camera Playback can give investigators the ability to see where a vehicle went after the initial capture. If a plate is picked up as a car enters a parking garage, for example, they can follow its path across multiple cameras — down the ramp, around corners, and out of sight — helping build a complete timeline.
Fuzzy Matching helps ensure that investigators don’t miss critical leads due to misread characters. If a plate reads “O” instead of zero, or “5” instead of “S,” the system still returns accurate results — a major upgrade from older systems that would fail under similar conditions.
Searchability is another key differentiator. With a simple, intuitive UI, the team can filter by date, time, or partial plate — speeding up their workflow instead of bogging them down with clunky queries or guesswork.

Where they currently have to wait for delayed information from multiple sources, the Peterborough Police Service would be able to act much more quickly with Verkada’s advanced LPR cameras. Should this extended footprint happen, it would strengthen their ability to monitor movement, disrupt coordinated criminal activity, and act decisively to keep their communities safe.