How Commerce ISD Put Six to Eight Hours a Week Back Into the Hallways with Coram

A District Police Chief Spending His Week 
Watching Video

Commerce ISD is a small rural district northeast of Dallas, serving six campuses, roughly 2,000 students, and 250 to 300 staff. Chief Seth McDaniel leads the district’s own police department, reports directly to the superintendent, and secured the grant that funded the project.

When he arrived four and a half years ago, cameras, access control, and emergency management were among his top priorities. The decade-old camera system was entirely manual and only accessible from the server. Investigations meant selecting a camera and time, watching a few minutes, switching cameras, and repeating the process. It left McDaniel with “a thousand notes of times and hallways.”

That created two major costs: days and nights. Routine footage review consumed six to eight hours a week, taking him away from being visible on campus, where students actively track officer locations. A 2 a.m. alarm meant a 20-minute drive to check the server. When a teacher shared her badge, identifying who had used it took three days of reviewing footage.

The Trial That Changed His IT Director's Mind

McDaniel had already decided. His IT director had not. The district had just changed IT directors, and the new one wanted an in-house system bought once, no licensing, to replace it if it breaks. Rather than argue, Coram shipped a server and six or seven cameras and let the district run the platform on its own hardware for a trial period.

• Facial Recognition: Click a face and see which camera that person passed, and when.
• AI Search: Describe an incident in plain language instead of scrubbing camera by camera.
• Works With Existing Cameras: Open architecture that pulls in the district's current IP cameras, no rip and replace.
• Remote Access: Check any camera from a phone, from home, at any hour.
• One Integrated Platform: Video, door access, panic buttons, and emergency management on one system.
• Hands-On Trial: Real hardware on site, running on the district's own cameras, before any commitment.

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From Six Hours of Video Review to Six Hours 
in the Hallways

Coram is live across the whole district now, though not every camera has been swapped
for new hardware yet. Even running on the old cameras, McDaniel says the difference shows up in hours.

• Find a Student in Seconds: Click a face and learn they were in the athletic hallway six minutes ago.
• Close Incidents the Same Day: A THC vape handoff traced to the student in about 25 minutes, not the three or four hours it used to take.
• Let Administrators Self-Serve: Give principals their own camera access so they stop waiting on the police department.
• Defuse Tension With Footage: Answer "what actually happened" in minutes, before anyone starts wondering why it is taking so long.
• Stay Visible: Spend the reclaimed hours in hallways, where students and staff can see you.

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The clearest change is arithmetic. Investigations that consumed one to two hours now take minutes, a badge question that once took three days resolves in a sitting, and the hours that used to disappear into video review come back as patrol time. None of it required replacing every camera first.

The change McDaniel talks about more, though, is what those hours buy. Two weeks into the school year, the high school's starting quarterback stopped him in the hallway to ask where he had been, because everyone had noticed he was not around. That is the job. Administrators have their own access now and have started thanking him for pushing the project through, which is not how conversations between school police and school administrators usually go.