The Real-Time Information Center—otherwise known as RTIC—is an information hub that gathers, analyzes and shares critical information in real time to support public safety operations between the Sparks Police Department and the Reno Police Department.
RTIC enhances decision making and improves response times for law enforcement, emergency services and other public safety partners.
Chief Kathryn Nance from the Reno Police Department says, "This technology will empower officers to act quickly, significantly affecting the effectiveness and coordination of public safety agencies beyond traditional law enforcement."
This computer system has a lot of tools such as live video feeds, aerial systems for video, geographic information systems, crime mapping and more to create a better understanding of what exactly is happening and where.
For the police departments and other first responder agencies it will help decide how many police they send to a scene, and to better understand what they may be facing when they get to the scene.
Chief Nance explains: "Real time truly means that we’re seeing activities as they are happening to people in our community. There is no delay as we call 911, and there is an opportunity for our officers to receive additional information maybe they can't see from their vantage point."
The system is already up and running.
They soft launched the system during the Santa Crawl in December that led to many arrests in a timely manner.
Here's how it works:
The computer system shows a map of cameras that are available for law enforcement to look through. The cameras that are available for them to look through show up as green, those that are not show up as red.
They can choose an area by circling it on the screen. The computer then shows police live video from the cameras they're allowed to have access through in that area.
They are also able to use facial recognition and license plate tracking to find a suspect from this system as well.
Chief Nance mentions that there are not a lot of people who call in incidents.
"It’s a known fact in law enforcement that the call that comes isn’t necessarily what you’re going to find when you get there. This is an added tool to help our officers to determine - do we need to send more officers to make sure that they’re safe, or maybe we can scale it back and send less officers because they’re dealing with a smaller incident than the way it was reported," she goes on to explain.
This system is not just for crime; it's also for monitoring natural disasters such as floods and wild fires in our community.
Chief Chris Crawforth from the Sparks Police Department says, "Fire and rescue services, applying real time updates on crowd density resource allocation analysis during critical incidents and providing up-to-date weather and training data during natural disasters.”
They have many cameras from the city they will be able to look through, but there are other businesses and buildings around town that will be prompted to be a part of the RTIC program to help law enforcement broaden their view through more cameras - but they will need permission from the public in order to do this.
Chief Crawforth mentions, "Our citizens and businesses will be able to choose which cameras we can access; this will quickly improve our surveillance network to improve public safety responses."
They mention that the complete success of the RTIC will be dependent on the community's help to allow law enforcement access to the cameras of their choice.
If you would like to find out more information and be a part of the program you can click the link here.
