Marc Weber Tobias ,CONTRIBUTOR
I am an investigative attorney and physical security specialist. Police departments around the country have been quietly implementing a powerful crime-fighting tool that promises to be the equal of DNA forensics in identifying and finding criminals. Even more importantly, it will provide information that will help prevent criminal activity and deadly traffic accidents.
I am an investigative attorney and physical security specialist. Police departments around the country have been quietly implementing a powerful crime-fighting tool that promises to be the equal of DNA forensics in identifying and finding criminals. Even more importantly, it will provide information that will help prevent criminal activity and deadly traffic accidents.
The technology is called DDACTS, which is an acronym for Data Driven Approach to Crime and Traffic Safety. It involves mounting on the roof of a police car three high-resolution digital cameras positioned to point forward and cover both sides of the vehicle. Each is equipped with infrared lighting which enables them to see in the dark. GPS is integrated into the system, and the digitized pictures of license plates are fed as they are captured to a laptop within the vehicle.
When police officers begin their shift, they download, via a high-speed WiFi hotspot at their station, the latest database of wanted vehicles, fugitive warrants, suspended or revoked drivers licenses, state and federal criminal databases, stolen cars, and other information on bad guys. These files are updated every four hours and allow the integration of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) cameras with criminal indices at the local, state, and national level for instant hits on cars. FBI statistics indicated that a majority of felony stops occur in vehicles, so the system in effect preselects targets of opportunity.
Denver has been a big advocate of the DDACTS system. Since taking office in 2011, Denver Police Chief Robert White has made it a priority to deploy new crime-fighting tech as its population continues to skyrocket. I was in Denver last week and was shown its DDACTS set-up, which costs $11,000 for each vehicle. You can watch my interview with Denver police commander Paul Pazen, who is the most knowledgeable within the department about the program.
Denver has trained more than a hundred officers on how to best use the new tool. It could drastically increase the effectiveness of field officers by not only giving the patrolman three more sets of eyes, but by doing things instantly with those additional eyes that no police officer could hope to accomplish alone. As a cop drives through his or her district, those cameras capture, read, and process hundreds of plates. More than 835,000 license plates have been read into Denver P.D.’s image database in the past two months. That has resulted in moe than 17,000 hits. The information is stored for 364 days before being permanently purged.
No comments:
Post a Comment