Real-Time Crime Centers Help Solve Cases and Secure Communities

Mission-Critical Operations Centers Deliver Real-Time Results

Cobb County launched its real-time crime center in 2022 with the aim of improving investigative capabilities and officer safety. The center includes a video wall from Haivision; feeds from security cameras, officer body cameras and LPRs; and software that centralizes data from all of these sources.

In the theft incident, officers in the real-time crime center were able to pull images of the suspects and their getaway car from the store’s security cameras. Although the car’s license plate was covered, officers were able to search for plateless vehicles that passed by an LPR. One of the stolen items contained a tracker, and officers were able to follow the suspects via GPS.

When the vehicle left Cobb County, the real-time crime center coordinated with state police, who pursued the getaway car and made arrests after the suspects crashed the vehicle.

In another case, the real-time crime center helped the department rapidly solve a shooting at an apartment complex. After a woman was shot, officers pulled video from security cameras at the complex, which showed three suspects (one carrying a gun) getting into the passenger side of a vehicle, indicating that there were four people total in the getaway car. Crime center analysts sent out descriptions and photos of the suspects, along with a plate number caught on an exit gate security camera. Officers made arrests within hours.

“When it happens this fast, the criminals haven’t even had time to get nervous or split up,” Case says. “They’re not used to the speed of the technology.”

Police Put the Pieces Together Thanks to a Unified View

When Miami Gardens, Fla., launched its real-time crime center in 2016, Commander Erik Gleason staffed the center alone, monitoring about 40 cameras covering city facilities.

Today, the center operates 20 hours a day, staffed by seven intelligence analysts and three detectives. The department now has around 250 security cameras (mostly from Axis Communications) throughout the city, plus gunshot detection technology and LPRs at key intersections, all of which feed data into three video walls from Haivision. The video walls are composed of commercial-grade Samsung displays, and data is processed using a video management system from Milestone Systems.

“The sooner we’re able to get that real-time information, the sooner we’re able to solve the crime,” Gleason says. “The real-time center helps us close cases as quickly as possible, get criminals off the street and prevent them from doing any further harm to the community.”

In one incident, officers were called to the scene of a single-car accident. When they arrived, they discovered that the woman driving the car had been shot. Without the real-time crime center, police would have had few leads. However, an alert from the gunshot detection system helped analysts quickly locate the scene of the shooting: a parking lot down the street.

Security camera footage showed a confrontation between two people in the lot. One shot at the other and missed, and the stray bullet killed the innocent driver passing by the lot. Police were able to distribute photos of the suspects and their vehicles and seek the public’s help identifying the shooter.

In the years since Miami Gardens rolled out its real-time crime center, major crimes in the city have dropped by about 10%, Gleason says.

“People might not want to commit crimes in an area with this many cameras,” he continues. “I do think that our timely closing of cases has really contributed to the decrease in crime across the city.”

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Cooperative Efforts Focus Quicky on Details

Joe Shipp, membership director for the National Real Time Crime Center Association, calls the emergence of real-time crime centers “one of the biggest changes” of his career, which has spanned a quarter century.

The hubs, he says, lead to faster case closure and also give officers the information they need to avoid dangerous chases and make arrests as safely as possible.

“The more information we have, the safer people are going to be. We can make better decisions," Shipp says. “We can do surgery with a scalpel instead of a machete.”

Shipp is also a sergeant with the Fort Worth Police Department in Texas, where he oversees day shift operations at the department’s real-time crime center. The facility, which began as a pilot program in 2012 before becoming a formal unit in 2015, now operates 24/7 with a staff of nearly 20. The center relies on feeds from thousands of public and private cameras and hundreds of LPRs.

Within the facility, officers track incidents on a mix of Samsung and Dell monitors, some of which are configured into video walls. The department is also looking into expanding its drone program, which gives officers a more cost-effective way to track suspects than the city’s police helicopter.

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The department is now seeking approval for a multimillion-dollar expansion that would regionalize operations. Fort Worth Police Department Sergeant Erik Lavigne, who is also communications director for the national association, notes that even departments with sophisticated crime centers can easily lose track of suspects who leave their jurisdictions. He sees regionalization as the next logical evolution of real-time crime centers.

“We want to bring in smaller departments around us that can’t afford to start from scratch,” Lavigne says. “One of the biggest gaps in policing is communication with your brothers and sisters next door.”