Cops Curb Crime with Cloud-Based Platform
In Secaucus, New Jersey, a town of about 18,000 residents located on a main corridor leading to and from New York City, the police force has found a new way to combat crime. Drawing upon the Internet and special application software, law enforcement here now uploads captured video footage of burglaries and other illegal activities to a web-based platform for subsequent distribution to police mobile devices and computers.
The quick transfer of such footage to officers and detectives is not only raising the level of cooperation and collaboration among department personnel, but also reducing the time it takes to identify suspects.
Although the department was already using content capture and distribution software for policy documents and training content, the system had never been used for viewing and sharing surveillance videos. That changed, however, when, over the course of one night last August, several burglaries occurred.
Retrieving security camera video footage of a suspect, Secaucus police decided to try something new and uploaded these images to the department’s cloud-based, content management platform for distribution throughout the force. Moments after being posted, the images started reaching detectives and patrol officers across the community, arriving on individual smartphones, laptop computers and other electronic devices.
This enabled the department to immediately draw upon the collective knowledge of its personnel regarding the identification, history and whereabouts of known, local individuals who might have been involved in the robberies. Within hours, one officer who viewed the footage was able to identify the suspect in the video, whereupon that person was quickly found and taken into custody.
Using the department’s content management system to collaborate and share video images yielded impressive results, enabling police to wrap up, in less than 24 hours, criminal activity that could have easily taken days or weeks to solve. But the benefits didn’t stop with removing a potential threat to local business and the community at large. Additionally, Secaucus police were now armed with an effective new way to rapidly distribute crime-related information and boost the policing process.
By electronically linking patrol officers with the detective division, Secaucus police are not only improving collaboration and cooperation, but dramatically increasing overall responsiveness. This was all made possible due to the built-in flexibility of the department’s cloud-based content management software platform.
–Steve Mackes