On Wednesday, the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office showed off its new Real Time Crime Center, focused on helping deputies respond and fight crime much more quickly and effectively.
The goal is to address and disrupt crime patterns, reduce the elapsed time between a reported crime and the arrest of the suspect, and improve the sharing of real-time investigative and situational awareness information.
Speaking in reference to a potential active shooter in a school Sheriff Lopez explained, “With these cameras accessing, we know he’s in a hall 3, or in the lunchroom, or he’s in the cafeteria, we can send those units immediately to those areas, and cordon off the other areas to make sure we keep him maintained, so this is also a good tool to save lives and to save mass casualties.”
The Real Time Crime Center should provide the sheriff’s office with the ability to capitalize on a wide and expanding range of technologies for efficient and effective policing, designed to allow law enforcement officers to respond quickly, or even immediately, to crimes in progress or to those that recently occurred. The Real Time Crime Center’s goal is to improve operational intelligence, with a proactive emphasis on officer, citizen, businesses and community safety.
Whether it’s a UAV, a traffic camera, a private cell phone video, a building security camera, or a bomb disposal robot, fūsus can extract the live video feed and send it to the emergency operations center and officers in the field.
Sheriff Marco Lopez says the new real time system will shorten response times and reduce the amount of time that passes between crime reports and arrests.
“One of the best scenarios is the active shooter at a school. We access those cameras, we can pinpoint the exact location, and shut everything else off around him to contain that individual to make sure we have a lot less loss of life,” Lopez said.
The Real Time Crime Center the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office is now using is currently being utilized by the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office, and the St. Cloud Police Department.
Ultimately, the implementation of a RTCC aims to increase productivity through efficient workflow and information sharing, provide real-time situational awareness, execute the agencies intelligence led policing initiative, support collaboration among several units of the Sheriff’s Office to include Communications, Patrol, Criminal Investigations, and Crime Analysis, and reduce the response time and elapsed time between call for service and arrest of the offender.
