Page 28 - Security Today, April 2019

Crime-busting Technology
Hartford Capital City Command Center fast-tracks investigations and solves crimes using a comprehensive surveillance solution BLy Kevin Taylor
ike many metropolitan cities, Hartford, CT has its share of crimes. And solving those crimes usually involves sifting through an overwhelming amount of data. Despite the array of technology the Hartford Police Department (HPD) had on hand, systems were
fragmented and not being used to their full potential. As a conse- quence, officers on the scene sometimes received information too late to act on it. It was time to modernize the department’s approach to police work and integrate all their disparate systems into one cohe- sive smart city solution.
Solving Crimes in Real-time
With help from Vulcan Security Technologies, a systems integrator and Axis partner, HPD unveiled its real-time command center in 2016, gathering a wealth of data intelligence under one roof. Within the walls of Hartford’s Capital City Command Center (C4) civilian crime analysts catalog information from incident reports, raw intel- ligence from beat officers and real-time video from a wide network of city-owned Axis high-definition surveillance cameras as well as private business and residential security cameras that feed into the center. Analysts also compile information from license-plate readers and a ShotSpotter system that triangulates the location of a shoot- ing based on the sound of gunfire. C4 staff even mines social media, looking for inflammatory language on Facebook and Twitter in an effort to head off threats to the community.
The smart city solution is built on a scalable, open standards plat- form and controlled through Milestone XProtect Corporate video management software. Because all the components are integrated, analysts can pull up camera views, map overlays, analytics and other crime fighting applications all within unified screen displays, which is a big time saver.
Adding BriefCam video synopsis analytics to the technology mix has elevated police work to another level.
“What used to take days of searching to find now takes minutes,” said Lt. Johnmichael O’Hare, Hartford Police Department and a super- visor at C4. “We’ve gone from fishing with a net to fishing with a spear.”
Finding a Needle in a Haystack
Because BriefCam can detect and extract objects within a frame of video, along with information about the type, attributes and behavior of those objects, C4 analysts are finding it invaluable when trying to track specific individuals, vehicles, even animals. They can quickly search through hours of video to locate and isolate something or someone of interest by size or color, its speed or direction. They can even map a car or person’s dwell time at a particular location.
“I can take 10 hours of video in a busy festival in a park and find all the people wearing a certain colored shirt, isolate them out and track them down in seconds,” O’Hare said.
As an example, when a call came into C4 about a pickpocket wearing a green shirt, O’Hare’s team used BriefCam to locate all the green shirts in the live video streaming from the scene. In seconds they were able to isolate and follow the perpetrator and convey her location to officers in the vicinity who quickly apprehended her.
Analysts used a similar technique to screen video from city bus cameras and make two separate homicide arrests.
thing we couldn’t have captured before,” O’Hare said. “In the other, we got the location of the suspect because he jumped on the bus. We were able to scrub the video and find out where he was dropped off and send officers to pick him up.”
Targeting Drug Busts
Sometimes knowing who the drug dealers are in the neighborhood isn’t sufficient to make an arrest. You have to catch them in the act. O’Hare sees the situation as a perfect opportunity to showcase what BriefCam can do to help police make a bust.
“We use BriefCam to help us see patterns,” O’Hare said. “The soft-
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“In one case, we got the license plate off the get-away car, some-
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