Are you policing crime or quality of life?
Welcome to episode 7 of real time policing when moments matter. Today, Dalton and Jamie will dig into the details of policing crime versus policing quality of life. Are these complimentary? Can you do both? Let's join their conversation now to find out.
Jamie:My man, did, did we snatch you off the beach on vacation for this episode? Pretty much. What's happening here?
Dalton:Yeah. I've I've pretty much come to the conclusion that, like, literally nobody's gonna listen to this or care, which is why I'm going full Hawaiian. Yeah. And and plus, I like to be the yin to your yang.
Jamie:I see.
Dalton:And, like, you're just Jamie who is known for for being in shirt and tie.
Jamie:Well, the memo I got was, hey, you missed the tie last week, so you need to put that back on and here you are from straight fresh from vacation.
Dalton:In in all seriousness, do you sleep in a tie? I do. Okay. Yeah. For sure.
Dalton:So in in my defense, like, this is an actual Hawaiian shirt. Meaning, I got it from Hawaii. Okay. So Alright. It's defensible.
Dalton:Right?
Jamie:I own 0 of those.
Dalton:0? Does that shock you? No. Okay. Unless it had a tie that you could
Jamie:put on it. I'm sure that they that there is a Hawaiian shirt tie set.
Dalton:I'm gonna get you one.
Jamie:Yeah. If anybody's listening slash watching to this, in Hawaii They're not. There is a long sleeve Hawaiian shirt from Hawaii Yep. With a tie, let me know.
Dalton:It's gotta be long sleeve though.
Jamie:Ask why your yeah. Your tattoos
Dalton:are even just covered in head to toe. Right. From neck neck down to ankles. Right. Completely covered in tats.
Dalton:Yeah.
Jamie:So,
Dalton:you know We should probably get started.
Jamie:Yeah. What are we talking about here today?
Dalton:I think we're gonna talk about live cameras and, why they're important. You wanna do that?
Jamie:Yeah. Why not? I mean, here we are. I mean, you we got you from vacation. Your time is valuable.
Dalton:Well, I'm actually going
Jamie:right back. As soon as this is over, I'm out here in Hornsby. Yeah. Good.
Dalton:That's good. So live cameras. Yeah. Let's talk about them. How do they fit in?
Dalton:What what is their pros? What is their cons? What is why does society fear them? Like, let's talk about all the things.
Jamie:Yeah. Where do we start? Let's start with big brother. I mean, you know, yeah. Why not?
Jamie:Yeah. Let's do it. Go ride to the elephant in the room. Yeah. It it's interesting to me that live camera is more big brother y feared stereotypically
Dalton:Yep. Than Than ALPR? Yeah.
Jamie:Yeah. Than a stationary camera. Right? You know, it it kinda goes back to something I said before when it comes to just data and big brother, which is, technically speaking, law enforcement has been able to be quote unquote big brother Yeah. For many decades.
Jamie:Yeah. Right? You just hope you hire the right ethical people, have the policies in place, have the oversight to ensure it doesn't happen. So I wanna get that out there though. Yeah.
Jamie:Because that is that, you know, society, until they know to look for cameras, they don't realize how many are actually out there.
Dalton:Oh, yeah. So, like, just driving over here Yeah. We probably passed what? A 100 cameras?
Jamie:There were a lot of cameras. Right?
Dalton:We didn't see
Jamie:them, but they're there. And and so if you were to imagine that, you know, both of us are in we're private citizens right now, and we're not in government work. And you drive down the street, you don't think, let me look for cameras because I'm worried about being tracked. Right. Most normal people don't.
Jamie:You know, non criminal folks, don't. But once you know that they're there, it's like everything else in life. You probably start seeing them a lot, and you think, my God. My city has a lot of cameras. Yeah.
Jamie:Right? So let's take any city USA that has live cameras at intersections. K. Traffic. Why are those
Dalton:there? Yeah. So those are there I guess it really just depends on who owns the camera. Because we see this we see this both ways. We see law enforcement owns them, and then we see traffic owns them, or maybe even DOTs, Department of Transportation.
Dalton:2 different use cases.
Jamie:K.
Dalton:You know, obviously, law enforcement wants those cameras to investigate crimes Right. Or be able to see what is occurring in the moment. Yeah. But, you know, the traffic departments are different. They wanna be able to monitor the the the roadways.
Jamie:Flow. Yeah. The traffic flow.
Dalton:Things of that nature. The things are completely noncriminal in nature. But, you know, I I do wanna talk about let's back up a little bit. Mhmm. I do wanna talk about the legality.
Dalton:That's kinda like the foundation of what we're gonna talk about because, you know, I'm gonna assume there's people watching this that that may not fully understand the legalities there. So cameras out in the public Mhmm. Completely allowed. Like, it's in the public space.
Jamie:I can film you in public. Yes. Jamie Hudson, the citizen
Dalton:And you probably do.
Jamie:All the time.
Dalton:All the time. I just don't know that. For sure. But it's called, what is it called? It's being out in the public and
Jamie:There's no right to reasonable expectation of privacy.
Dalton:There's no expectation Thank you. Yeah. No expectation of privacy in the public
Jamie:view. Sure.
Dalton:Right. So we're talking walking down the road. Yeah. Stores that are open that anybody can go into. We are not talking about inside somebody's house or on their property.
Jamie:There's a thing called the 4th amendment.
Dalton:Exactly. Exactly.
Jamie:So Alright.
Dalton:Completely legal, completely allowable. Yeah. And it's really no different than an officer sitting in a plainclothes car, or even a marked patrol unit with binoculars. Right?
Jamie:Sure.
Dalton:They can do that. It's completely illegal. Completely allowable for them to do that. So a camera, no different Yeah. From a legality standpoint.
Dalton:Okay. So, you know, understanding that Yeah. Let's talk about how it all fits in. So tell me some stories.
Jamie:Yeah. I mean, in Elk Grove, we we had a lot of folks do tours of our real time information center. And so, I I can still talk to this to this day that Elk Grove, we built our infrastructure in reverse. Yep. How so?
Jamie:We built our infrastructure starting with live video cameras and, out at intersections. And like I mentioned before, we opened our real time information center to be a video monitoring center. If there is a reported vehicle collision, we wanted to be on scene of that quickly to help assess the severity of the crash, to help then, determine the level of response. And so we had cameras from the start. And so anytime a crash happened, anytime a crime occurred, we were using our pan tilt zoom cameras that were up on the intersections.
Jamie:And that that's a whole other comp part of a conversation as well. So, you know, do you have pan tilt zoom? Do you have fixed? We'll we'll get into that. But, also, the connectivity is a is part of a discussion.
Jamie:Right? Hours were nearly all connected by cellular. And so we had, recorders on the edge, meaning we had a recorder for each camera at that intersection and then, transmitted that data. Some are connected by fiber, etcetera. And so for us, our wins on cameras actually came before our wins on LPR, because we didn't have a lot of LPR out there in the wild, doing anything.
Jamie:So, what we did was we learned to use those cameras for everything we could. Right? So if a crime occurred and it was 2 blocks down, we would try to zoom 2 blocks down to see if we can help out on that call. So, we leveraged those cameras, but and and the police department owned those cameras. We maintained those cameras.
Jamie:Great IT, staff at at Elk Grove PD. And so by doing that, we shared the cameras with traffic management. Right? So they still got that usefulness that you talked about, traffic flow, traffic volume. So that that was how we used them initially.
Jamie:And super valuable, not the cheapest things. Right? Yeah. They're they're they're not the least expensive item you could have. Yeah.
Jamie:Right?
Dalton:And and they require constant maintenance. Yep. Yeah. And and constant upkeep.
Jamie:That's right. There's retention schedules that Retention, data,
Dalton:VM there's a lot of things that go along with it.
Jamie:Yeah. Pretty tricky. But I'll admit, when I was the manager of the real time center, I didn't care about all that. Yeah. I cared how much does it cost, and do I need more?
Jamie:Right? And so that was, it it is a tricky thing, though. There's a
Dalton:lot to it. So we kinda started in a similar spot. I mean, we didn't initially have cameras in the crime center at first. Mhmm. This is something that we just phase in over time.
Dalton:So we had a foundation in, you know, going back to the previous episodes, with just analyzing calls for service. Even without technology. No license plate readers, no cameras. But what we found was when we started introducing live cameras into that environment that we were already accustomed to Yeah. Then it really just became an extension of helping the officers.
Dalton:But what we found out very, very quickly was the live cameras, especially,
Jamie:unit. Yes. Right? Yes. So ALPR is a tool.
Jamie:Live camera allowed that operator to become, for lack of a better term, a policing unit.
Dalton:Yeah. A resource. Another off a virtual officer, if you will. Yeah. So it, it actually changed the dynamic pretty severely in in in the crime center.
Dalton:And I told them, like, when we first started rolling it out, I said, look. Our job is about to change. Yeah. And they didn't really understand the timing. Like, okay.
Dalton:Whatever. But when we started putting it in and we started watching them because we started at our highest crime locations Yeah. Because we were had we had a lot of spots. And this is probably gonna be unique to cities with, you know, probably more significant crime crime problems than most of our listeners have. Right.
Dalton:But we had a lot of we call opener drug markets, for example. So we strategically put cameras at, you know, 4, 5, or 6 of these. So right out of the gate, I mean, literally the 1st week, we're just watching drug dealers.
Jamie:Yep.
Dalton:And we're calling in air strikes. Very, very proactive, and we were thrust into that world of live cameras. Yeah. And it was obviously extraordinarily successful. I mean, we actually shut down some markets because we hit them so hard Yeah.
Dalton:And they got to the point where they expected it
Jamie:Yeah.
Dalton:Because they knew we were watching.
Jamie:Yeah. And, you know, you so easy to see the value criminally. Right? To to help solve crime. The value for quality of life.
Jamie:We we located just in our agency, that I would before I retired, we located critically missing people off of those live cameras that we could move around, zoom in, ensure that that's the person that we're looking for, and assist with a grid search. So quality of life issues, live cameras help. Right? There's a lot of things that you can do with live cameras that limit the police interaction with the community if if needed. Yeah.
Jamie:Right? And so yeah. Now, we also were asked, are PTZs better than fixed cameras? Yeah.
Dalton:Yeah. Let's talk about that, because that's something I wanna cover because, yeah, I think that's a question.
Jamie:Yeah. PTZ pan tilt zoom.
Dalton:Yeah. Pan tilt zoom, which is the cameras that you can remotely move around Yeah. As opposed to I'm looking at one spot Right. As opposed to even one that looks 360 degrees. So let's, let's start on it.
Dalton:Yeah. Talk to me.
Jamie:Well, you know, so there's the obvious drawbacks to a pan tilt zoom camera over a multi sensor camera, which is multi sensor, let's say 360, 360 degree view. Let's just call it that for this for this sake. Pan tilt zoom and a a single directional camera only have a limited field of view. Right? And so, if the easiest way for me to talk to, an agency representative about this is to ask them, do you envision a live operator working this camera?
Jamie:Right? Meaning, do will you have a person that that works this camera? That answer almost always dictates where you should start, in my opinion. Right. Right?
Jamie:If the answer is, well, no. We we need cameras so that we can retroactively go back so it's more investigative, then a fixed camera makes all the sense in the world because it's gonna capture more of the intersection. Right? If the answer is yes, you're gonna have live people monitor those. Then the ability to pan around, to tilt up and down, to zoom in and out at will Yeah.
Jamie:Is way more efficient and better than a single directional camera if you have a live person.
Dalton:What do
Jamie:you what what do you think about that? Do you disagree or
Dalton:No. It was so we almost exclusively had PTZ cameras. Mhmm. But for that purpose, because we were very very proactive. And that's just kinda how we started.
Dalton:So we had success very early on with being able to move the cameras, manipulate them, and get involved in the action and give the officers information. But, I mean, there's a I I I've obviously got an unlimited supply of stories just like you do. But I I I can remember one. So, I mean, take ALPR out of the equation altogether. Yeah.
Dalton:Obviously, when you pair those 2 up together, that's just next level
Jamie:That's right. Layered technology. But It's like fishing with a net. Yeah. Exactly.
Dalton:Or dynamite. You gotta lure
Jamie:a hand and sand over time. Yeah.
Dalton:But I remember this incident where it was, like, in the middle of the night and one of my officers was watching a camera at a convenience store that was traditionally high crime. And they saw a guy walking in the parking lot, and he started shooting. You know, obviously, we didn't hear it. We just see, you know, muzzle flashes and things of that nature. We did not have any license plate reader cameras in that area because this was pre that.
Dalton:He proactively zoomed in on the license plate the guy got into Yeah. Watched him leave.
Jamie:Yeah. So, like,
Dalton:you're talking about a situation where you're getting involved as an eyewitness, as an officer Yep. Manipulating that. I can't I can't even say that word.
Jamie:No. You did.
Dalton:You did. You did. It's especially
Jamie:you were on vacation. We're not gonna hold it against you on this one. Why don't you worry about that?
Dalton:I can't remember the other word I couldn't say. But it put him in the action. And, like, literally gave Yeah. A key piece of evidence to that investigator to get that person in custody.
Jamie:And an important note on that, a single frame capture of a license plate will be there as long as you have recorded video. Right? So as that operator or that detective zoomed in on that plate, as soon as you see, okay, I got the plate, you can come right back out and continue using that camera for something else knowing you can go back and grab that plate if you need to, if you have to go back and grab it. Right? That's an important note for people because, that made all the difference in the world to how I operated.
Jamie:Yeah. When I realized, okay, I don't have to stay on that while I write it down or any of that. I can get it. Somebody else can go in the recorded video real quick, grab it for for us, and and go. Yeah.
Jamie:And then
Dalton:that goes back to the teamwork aspect in the crime center that we're talking about. Yeah. But, you know, I think what people need to need to realize, and and I think a lot of people are realizing this, is that it goes beyond, you know, your your prototypical crime and investigating crime. You know, right. To a lot of other things that, I mean, may touch on crime or even be illegal for that matter, but illegal dumping is a good example.
Jamie:Yeah.
Dalton:So police department put a bunch of cameras out.
Jamie:Right.
Dalton:And our, code compliance section basically got wind of how proactive we were at watching cameras, and they wanted us to monitor these locations that had a lot of illegal dumping. Yep. So they started funding
Jamie:Which high high crime. Right? Yeah. I mean, if you think about that the guy
Dalton:who dumped the body in the story I told you about earlier. Right. Yeah. But, that was one of those cameras. Yeah.
Dalton:But we actually saw a pretty dramatic decrease in illegal dumping Yep. Because code compliance put the cameras out. Yep. We monitored them. We'd get alerted.
Dalton:See when cars would pull up. Right. Watch them unload stuff. Yeah. Zoom in on their license plate.
Jamie:Quality of life. Quality of life. Right? It's it if you are from an agency that has an illegal dumping problem, I guarantee some segment of your society is upset by that. Yeah.
Jamie:Right? And so we go back to the value versus return. It may be valuable to you to have a camera that's looking for that. And that's counterintuitive to what normal law enforcement thought is. Right?
Jamie:If I want a camera, I want it over here catching this, not Right? If I want a camera, I want it over here catching this. Not the illegal dumpers, but quality of life. It's huge.
Dalton:Well, especially if somebody else is funding it. Yeah. All the place leaders are listening to this. You know, it's it's funny because, you know, going back to what I was saying about getting involved in the action from a
Jamie:point of center.
Dalton:On the lines of a legal legal dummy, this is a really funny story. Because they used to do this quite a bit. Yep. And there was one officer in particular who loved doing this. We would see a car pull up our truck and they'd start dumping stuff.
Dalton:And he would do it on the plate and then what did he do? He he started researching There
Jamie:it is. Who owns this?
Dalton:Who is this guy? Yeah. Oh, let me find his cell phone. Yeah. I cannot tell you how many times it happened where he would find the dude's cell phone.
Jamie:I love where this is going. He would pick up the phone and
Dalton:call him and you would see him on camera.
Jamie:Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Joe, do you need that couch anymore? Oh, you don't.
Jamie:See, what happened?
Dalton:It's like, hey, we're watching you right now. We're pretty smart. Can you pick that Beatrice back up?
Jamie:Just go on and take it back home.
Dalton:And put it
Jamie:back in your truck.
Dalton:If you don't think that that freaks out somebody so much that they're never gonna Yeah. Legally dump again That's awesome. Yeah. They're just not gonna do it.
Jamie:Yeah. So, I mean, that that's a great great example, of truly quality of life. Now, you can go down that rabbit hole too. Right? Let's say you guys didn't do that, and now somebody has to go out to clean that up.
Jamie:Somebody has to go out to investigate it. So, again, goes back to to efficiency. Right? Some of the other things, you know, internally, we show value to our internal stakeholders, our officers on patrol, in the sense that if they make a vehicle stop and we have a camera that's in that general area, then a real time operator can watch over that vehicle stop, and they'll be the first set of eyes to see if anything goes wrong there. Yeah.
Jamie:Right? And so that's huge.
Dalton:So I actually have another story that goes contrary to what you're I mean, I agree with what you're saying a 100%. Obviously, that's that's valuable. We used to do the same thing. Yeah. But there was one in particular.
Dalton:And and granted, this wasn't, like, common, but it did happen. And it made me pause and think, like, are these officers relying too much on us? And I don't
Jamie:I don't
Dalton:know if I've ever told you this story.
Jamie:I haven't heard, anything about a cover officer. So
Dalton:So, disturbance call at a gas station. Mhmm. We see the guy. We're watching him. Officer pulls up on camera, we're seeing, and a foot chase starts.
Jamie:Yeah.
Dalton:And we're watching the foot chase. We hear the the officer calling out where he's running. They run up onto the interstate, and we're continuing to follow. Now this is in the middle of the night. Yeah.
Dalton:Okay? That's an important thing to note. So we're watching the suspect, and he's running, and he stops. Officer's probably, I don't know, 30 yards behind him. He stops, reaches into his pocket, turns around, punches out just like this.
Dalton:Yep. And what does the officer do? He calls us on radio and says, crime center, what does he have in his hand?
Jamie:Oh. Yeah. Yeah. So See, I couldn't answer when he said, what does the officer do? Not to take the gravity away from this moment.
Jamie:But I've never been an officer, so my initial thought was he soils himself. That's what I would do. Maybe. Yeah. Perhaps.
Jamie:But, no. That that's concerning. Right?
Dalton:Yeah. It what so all all we could see was a silver object that had a light on it. Yeah. But based on the totality of those circumstances, foot chase Yeah. He's in a shooting stance
Jamie:Right.
Dalton:Item in his hand. If that officer would have shot him
Jamie:Yeah.
Dalton:I think it would have been completely justified because of the totality. Yeah.
Jamie:But he
Dalton:did, thankfully. Yeah. Because it turned out, it ended up being a flashlight. He was trying to suicide that cop. Mhmm.
Dalton:But going back to what we were talking about, interestingly enough, that officer was actually relying too much
Jamie:Yeah.
Dalton:On us, which, you know, you hate to say that's a bad thing. You want the the street officers to to trust the crime center and know that they're gonna be involved.
Jamie:You never wanna you you never want that. Yeah. Right? But you also never want an officer to change their personal safety habits based on the assumption Yes. That we can see them.
Jamie:Yes. Right? That that for sure. That I used to hate that as a dispatcher, dispatch supervisor, the concept of somebody's gonna cancel their cover on a call just because. Right?
Jamie:Whatever the reason. Yeah.
Dalton:We're not physically there. I can't help you if you're gonna define. I can watch you, but I can't help you.
Jamie:Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So that I mean, that's that's good though to bring up because what an agency shouldn't do is put live cameras up to try to augment their staffing so that they don't have to respond with 2 officers to a 2 officer call.
Jamie:Right? They they should not look at that as a an additional resource that way.
Dalton:Expand that even further, Jamie, and take to live streaming body cameras.
Jamie:Sure. Yeah.
Dalton:And now the crime center can monitor, like, literally what the officer sees in the moment. Yeah. Yeah. I I it's a fear of mine that people are gonna become reliant on that. Like, you've got a crime center backup.
Dalton:No. You don't.
Jamie:Yeah. Right.
Dalton:They're just there for situational awareness.
Jamie:Yeah.
Dalton:Let's let's come back and talk more about it afterwards, but let's jump to Caity and let her tell a soft story, and we'll come back and talk about it soon.
Jamie:Yeah. Let's go.
Caity:Today's soft story is going to talk about an agency you may recognize. You've probably heard it 10,000 times from the great Dalton Webb. So technology isn't just about keeping the community safe. It keeps first responders safe as well. So a flock LPR head comes in for a stolen vehicle.
Caity:White settlement police department and Fort Worth police department both start responding to that scene. So as they're responding to that hit for the stolen car, dispatch personnel at White settlement start using a flock safety Condor PTZ camera. Now that camera has PTZ functionality, which means pan, tilt, and zoom. So as they're using that camera to search for the suspect vehicle in the area that it hit, they locate it in the McDonald's parking lot. Now, otherwise, officers would have just driven around and hoped that they found that.
Caity:But now, they were able to relay that information to responding units and they knew exactly where to go, where the suspect was facing and how to make a safe apprehension. This led to a safe apprehension, obviously, but also recovery of that vehicle and overall safety for everyone around that parking lot, around that area, out and about in the day. There's a video that goes along with this story if you care to watch it. It's fun, it's exciting, and it shows the good police work our folks do every day. Back to you, Dalton.
Caity:I know you wanna talk about Fort Worth.
Dalton:So as soon as Jamie is done texting, we'll get back.
Jamie:I got important things, man. I got to order dinner. You were TikTok ing.
Dalton:That's what it was. So good story.
Jamie:Yeah. Again, I mean, that I love hearing Saul stories.
Dalton:Right. They're always good. We'll we'll make sure to tag that on YouTube for anybody who wants to watch the video. But a perfect example of a real time crime center getting involved and providing essentially overwatch Yep. You know, like we were talking about, even though there were other officers there Right.
Dalton:There's a possibility that there's a situation where that car angles itself and there's a standoff. Yeah. And you at that point, I think you do rely on the cameras if they have the right vantage point to be able to see what that person is doing. Sure.
Jamie:And there you know, it it brings up just the the concept of when we talk about just live video. And you and you mentioned body worn cameras, before we went to the solve story. The the idea that when you say live video, it's not just something hanging in the air. Right? We we you can use in car cameras.
Jamie:Those are really good. We don't make those. Right? They are really good. You can use in car cameras for, let's say, a barricaded person inside of a vehicle.
Jamie:And you use car number 1 that's behind that vehicle. You can live stream that scene from the ground level. And then you have your your potentially have your drone providing overhead video or your fixed camera or your whatever. Right? You can take a body worn camera off of somebody that is not, you know, outside of policy by taking it off.
Jamie:Set it on something, and now you have a live stream of an event as well. Right? So there there are camera methods. You could have a special equipment officer that can run a pan tilt zoom camera on a tripod somewhere. We get it going with power, and now you have that.
Dalton:So Well, ultimately, all it comes down to is provide me the ability to see what has happened. That's right. And we're in the past.
Jamie:And be creative if we have to be. Yeah. Right? So that that's the that's the way is, like, you know, one of the examples that that I use, for that is we had a a barricaded person in a house. It was raining torrentially that day.
Jamie:And in California, you know, back in this day, we didn't get much rain anyway. So, it was raining hard. Right? People I'll tell you though, after what we drove through a couple weeks back, maybe it wasn't as torrential as I thought. Did the rain pay taxes too?
Jamie:Likely. Yeah. Yeah. Likely so. I didn't
Dalton:know if if if rain in California was taxed like
Jamie:Yeah. I mean, it's it's on its way to you guys. So that's the thing. So, yeah, we share it. We share our water with others.
Jamie:So, oh, that's where a sharing state.
Dalton:That's good.
Jamie:He that's funny. So torrentially pouring down rain, barricaded guy inside a house, drone really couldn't fly. Right? I mean, it can technically. It just can't do it very well.
Jamie:And so we used a body worn camera to put it right on the Bearcat, right on the hood of the Bearcat, and got a stream there until we had a pan tilt zoom on a tripod that could be delivered to do the same thing. So to the to the listeners and the agencies out there, don't be afraid to be creative in the moment. Just make sure everybody stays within policy. Right? You don't wanna take a body worn camera off of somebody that is now gonna be part of your stack to make entry into the to that house.
Jamie:Right?
Dalton:So the you you mentioned drones, and and I know we're gonna talk about drones in the later episode. But I wanna bring this up because I think, you know, with with the peripheral
Jamie:You can do it. There it is. There it is. It's vacation. Again, proliferation.
Jamie:There it is.
Dalton:Somebody teach me how to say that word, please. So anyway, with those DFR programs, drug is a first responder becoming more prevalent. Yeah. Right? You're they're appearing in more and more.
Dalton:And eventually, I think you and I agree, they're gonna be everywhere. Yeah. The question is asked, why do I need live cameras everywhere if I've got a drone? Yeah. I wanna point this out because the drone isn't always there.
Dalton:That's right. It's really only responding in real time to provide situational awareness or proactive ability. But it cannot go back in time That's right. For your officers, your investigators to review, which is why cameras are so important. They change everything.
Jamie:Yeah. And, you know, yes. To to to summarize your statement there, yes. That it's absolutely important that that distinction is made. And that, you know, that goes also to, can you legally, where you're from, for where our listeners are from, record live video.
Jamie:And if you can, you should be. Right? Just so that you can use it for investigative purposes. Right? You record it within the law.
Jamie:You record it. You have your, again, your attention schedule. But you shouldn't be afraid to record video just because you think it's going to open something up to more FOIA requests or public records act requests. At the end of the day, that it it's video that is innocuous. Right?
Jamie:It's video that's just covering an intersection. And so, that recorded video has solved homicides. It's, you know, it's helped everything.
Dalton:Can I can I just say it baffles me why I don't wanna get more FOIA requests? It's, like, the number one reason why they don't wanna record.
Jamie:Like, come on, man. Like, release it. Move on. Yeah. It's, yeah.
Dalton:Because you don't wanna do more work That's finding the video. I get it. Like, you're busy. So don't let that be the reason.
Jamie:Yeah. I don't disagree.
Dalton:But
Jamie:so I'll I'll play devil's advocate on this. I I understand the hesitancy or at minimum the the misunderstanding of the severity of that. I mean, in this sense, the misunderstanding of the severity of that. I mean, in this sense, when in the 911 world, when we first heard the concept of taking 911 calls from cell phones Mhmm. We all thought it was the end of the world.
Jamie:Right? We all thought, oh, there it goes. We take 10,000 calls a month now. We're gonna take 50,000 a month. We don't have the people for it.
Jamie:It's gonna be the end of the world. When in reality, people just used that method instead of a landline. Right? To a to a certain extent. Same thing applies with FOIA requests.
Jamie:Right? Yeah. Most places request information for a reason, whatever. They might be writing an article. They might have some specific event.
Jamie:Yep. But at the end of the day, it's a it's something you're gonna have to do anyway Right. As an agency. So, yeah, I agree.
Dalton:We've only got a couple minutes left, and there's one thing that I do wanna call out, because I I don't think it's talked about enough.
Jamie:Is it my sweet tie?
Dalton:No. It is not your sweet tie. It's my awesome Hawaiian shirt. And that is the mental aspect
Jamie:Yeah.
Dalton:Of the real time operator Yeah.
Jamie:Being involved in cameras. Like, 2 two angles on this. Go ahead with yours.
Dalton:Yeah. So so I I think it's it's not studied enough. It's not looked at enough. Okay. The effect that a real time crime center operator Yeah.
Dalton:Can have from a mental standpoint of watching a person get shot and killed live on camera and not do anything about it. Yeah. Right. We're talking these things are going to happen and they have happened. Sure.
Dalton:We have literally watched, I don't know how many people get shot and killed in a crime center. Mhmm. And I admittedly did not think about it. Yeah. Because everybody in my crime store is
Jamie:a sworn officer. And if we're in the business already Yep. We don't necessarily pay attention to that aspect until we have to. Yes. That that's law enforcement.
Jamie:That's probably society in general. Law enforcement's what I knew. But, yeah, you you know, that element. You know, if your agency does psychological evaluations as part of a background check or hiring process for your sworn officers or for your dispatchers, you should probably consider adding that to your staff that are gonna see live video inside of a real time center.
Dalton:Or even or even have something put in place, a policy such as a debrief. If you see something particularly Nice.
Jamie:Have them included in a wellness program, department wellness program. Yeah.
Dalton:Yeah. That that absolutely needs to be done. I don't see enough of it. Yeah. Are some people talking about this in the space, and it needs to
Jamie:be talked about. Yeah. The second angle on that is those operators feel as though they are absolutely part of the solution of that particular event. And so if you get the right people in that space to work those calls, they could not be more excited to help with that live video mitigate that call for service. Yep.
Jamie:It's just amazing. Well, this one was good, man. We brought you from vacation, clearly.
Dalton:Yeah. I'm gonna go back to Trida.
Jamie:Yeah. And, we'll see everybody next time.
Dalton:Yeah. I'll
Jamie:see you, buddy. See you, man.
Kevin:Thanks for joining us for another installment of Real Time Policing When Moments Matter. We hope you found this episode educational and entertaining. With only 2 episodes left before we wrap this season, be sure to join us for episode 8. Jamie and Dalton will jump right into the controversy of audio detection. You don't wanna miss it.
