Rocky Mount police Chief Robert Hassell highlighted the benefits of the police department’s Real Time Intelligence Center, which uses an online platform to integrate and enhance data from investigations to help make Rocky Mount safer, in a demonstration of the new technology on Tuesday.
“This is more than just having this as a tool to investigate crime. It also is a deterrent to prevent crime,” Hassell told reporters minutes after police officers showed how the fūsus platform worked in a fictional pursuit of a wanted person in a car.
The purposes of the platform, which was implemented in 2021, are to help improve the transparency of policing in Rocky Mount, enhance the safety of officers and more quickly apprehend suspected criminals and locate people reported missing.
The platform was at first used by the 911 telecommunicators in the police department’s building, but the department decided to have space for the intelligence center just steps away from 911. The intelligence center is in what had been an officers’ workout room before being transformed into a conference room.
Currently, the fūsus platform is supported by more than 500 camera feeds, both from devices owned by the city and by partner businesses.
Hassell said Tuesday that the platform has not only helped those businesses tremendously but also saved them time because police detectives no longer need to take a business manager or business owner away from their daily duties to be able to pull up video footage.
Hassell said that instead the police department can pull up the video footage remotely at the intelligence center.
Hassell said that once that video footage is identified, then that footage is tagged and placed in a secure area in the system for holding for use as future evidence in that case.
Additionally, Hassell said that the plan is to increase the data coming into the intelligence center via more city-owned cameras.
Hassell also said that the plan includes having devices with four cameras inside of them to provide four-directional views at major intersections.
The goal is to include a total of 200 more views with those devices, and the police department has already set up and activated about 30 of those camera views.
The police department calls this latest set of electronic eyes “safe city cameras.”
The fūsus platform uses footage of videos from the safe city cameras, as well as information from license plate readers, alerts of gunfire via ShotSpotter sensors, video footage from police officers’ body-worn cameras and video footage from a police drone.
More specifically, Hassell emphasized that when a high-priority call comes in or when a crime is occurring, the intelligence center can be used to remotely search around the area of the incident and pull up any video from any camera in that area.
Hassell also emphasized that when the police department is investigating the case of a missing person, the intelligence center can be used to remotely rewind cameras with such capability to see whether there is any video footage of that person having left a location and in what direction.
Not only that, but the intelligence center can also be used in response to major accidents on roadways by remotely pulling up video from cameras to see how bad the traffic congestion is and if the police department needs to deploy more officers to the scene to help, Hassell noted.
One question asked of Hassell was about the assurance of privacy of those who are neither suspects in a crime nor are allegedly linked to that crime.
Hassell said that systems used by the police department includes a policy specifying and training officers and staff what can and cannot be done with such systems.
Hassell also said that there is an auditing process so the police department knows when officers and staff log in and out of such systems and what they had been doing.
“What we don’t want to do is to use this technology or take a partnership with a business and use those systems outside of what it was intended for,” he said.
Another question asked of Hassell was whether he sees any drawbacks in having the intelligence center, which is about a $1.2 million investment.
He said he does not and that, in fact, there are citizens who have requested certain police technologies to be included in their respective communities.
“And I believe they’re asking because they know that we’ve used this technology responsibly,” he said. “And so, with that trust they give the police department, they know that this technology is going to be used solely in the effort in making sure their community, their neighborhoods are safe.”
Headquartered northeast of Atlanta, fūsus is in the business of unifying data and live video feeds into cloud-based crime-fighting centers.
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