The Case for Real-Time Crime Centers

When a law-enforcement organization is contemplating the implementation of a real-time crime center (RTCC), it is best to begin with an understanding of what an RTCC is — and isn’t.

RTCCs primarily exist to provide law-enforcement officials and other personnel with enhanced situational awareness to better inform their decision-making when a significant incident has occurred. This could involve determining what response to deploy, sharing intelligence concerning what responders might encounter, and providing tactical instructions that will guide their response to make them more effective and keep them safer. RTCCs have been referred to as “tactical dispatch centers” for good reason.

All of this is accomplished through aggregation software that equates to an RTCC’s central nervous system. The software collects all sorts of data feeds and then parses the data so that it is manageable, contextual, and actionable. The data feeds are generated by public and private video systems, gunshot identification/location systems, law-enforcement records-management systems, and more. Sans parsing, the amount of information available to RTCC personnel would be overwhelming and thus unproductive. The parsing can be done manually or automatically, with the latter approach driven by configurations set by the law-enforcement organization.

RTCCs often are confused with intelligence centers, which gather information to give law-enforcement officials a clearer picture of the threat environment in which their department and its personnel are operating, and in some cases to enable them to engage in predictive policing. For example, crime statistics might indicate that a particular area of a city has seen a significant increase in car-jackings, burglaries, and snatch-and-grab thefts, or a particular street corner has emerged as the place for illegal drug transactions.

Another example of intelligence gathering concerns the monitoring of social-media feeds. An early example of how social media can be leveraged occurred in 2012 in conjunction with the Super Bowl played in Indianapolis. An intelligence center was established near the stadium, where platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and YouTube were monitored for six weeks leading up to the event. A total of 65 million postings, tweets and blogs were parsed, using 500 keywords and several algorithms that had been developed for this purpose.

The effort uncovered no red flags, which gave public-safety officials a much greater comfort level given that about 1 million people were about to descend on the downtown area where the stadium is located for a variety of fan-related events in the days leading up to the big game.

So, an intelligence center enables law-enforcement officials to prepare for what might happen. In contrast, an RTCC helps officials react more effectively to an incident that is happening — it’s all about detection and apprehension in real time — which is event-driven at its core.

Here’s an example. Let’s say that an armed robbery occurred at a bank and the perpetrators already have fled the scene. There is a lot of situational awareness that can be shared with the responding officers while they are in transit. Here are just a few of the data feeds that an RTCC could leverage in real time to support the response:

• The bank’s security camera system
• GPS trackers hidden in the money stacks taken by the robbers
• Security cameras of nearby businesses, residences, and schools
• Municipal and/or county fixed camera systems
  • For example, the city of Chicago maintains a video-surveillance system, managed by its Office of Emergency Management, that consists of more than 50,000 cameras mounted in fixed locations and on public-transit trains and buses
• Helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (i.e., drones)
• Vehicle-mounted cameras
• Cameras worn by offers in foot pursuit
• Facial-recognition systems
• Automatic license plate reader (ALPR) systems
• Smartphones
• Computer-aided dispatch systems that capture caller details of potential witnesses
• Law-enforcement records-management systems

Any one of these data feeds could be integral to apprehending the suspects, but let’s zoom in on ALPR systems with a real-life example. In 2015, a Virginia news reporter and her cameraman were gunned down while doing a live interview. The state police transmitted the license-plate number of the rental car that the suspect was driving. Shortly after, a trooper typed the number into her mobile data terminal and received a hit from the ALPR system — the suspect’s vehicle had passed by just a few minutes earlier.

The trooper immediately began her pursuit, catching up to the suspect about four minutes later. Six minutes after that, the suspect’s car veered into an embankment and troopers found him with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He died a couple of hours later.

That’s a pretty powerful example of the impact an RTCC can have on law-enforcement response.

A future blog will explore typical challenges that emerge when implementing an RTCC and key considerations that every law-enforcement organization — regardless of size are scope — should contemplate in doing so. So, stay tuned!

Jack Dougherty is MCP’s manager of public-safety applications. Email him at JackDougherty@MissionCriticalPartners.com.