"We're on the verge we think of a period where cities are going to start thinking differently about their public safety information, and other information from other systems like transportation and water and perhaps social services," says Cleverley. He says the IOC will help a city, and law enforcement in particular, utilize high-tech algorithms to harness and analyze information collected via databases, surveillance cameras, and even audio and weather sensors.
Initially, a dashboard of such information from various city departments would be made available to the police chief or senior officers in or around the Intelligent Operations Center building, Cleverley tells POLICE. "But you could envisage over time, parts of information going to officers in vehicles, to handheld devices," he says.
Patterned in part after the NYPD realtime crime center, the IBM IOC is intended to analyze and distill data to provide timely information relevant to the individual officer.
"Video analytics can use high-powered algorithms that interpret information to provide alerts, becoming more automated over time. You could see a vehicle going down a street the wrong way and get an alert. Or get an alert if someone walks away from luggage and doesn't come back to it at an airport. There are also algorithms that help with crowd estimation."
While this solution is currently structured for use by larger municipalities, it might be possible in the future to provide such services to a collection of smaller cities or even several law enforcement agencies located geographically near each other so they can share and analyze information more efficiently.
