L.A.P.D. Tackling Toughest Areas with Wi-Fi
The City of Los Angeles is big in every waysome 465 square miles with four million people. But its police department of 9,000 is smallabout a quarter the size of New York’s and two thirds the size of Chicago. This means that the L.A.P.D. is always looking for new solutions to undertake a difficult job. Commander Charlie Beck, a career L.A.P.D. police officer, says: “Technology is the only way that I’ve found that a small police department with a big job, like L.A.P.D., has any chance of providing public safety.”
At the W2i Digital Cities Convention in Los Angeles, Commander Beck traced a growing arc of success with video surveillance in improving public safety in certain neighborhoods of the city. Now, the cameras and several other applications are being enabled with Motorola Wi-Fi mesh infrastructure in what is arguably the city’s toughest neighborhoodJordan Downsto deliver video and real-time information to officers in their patrol cars. The infrastructure will also provide high-speed Internet access to residents and local schools. The following is adapted from Commander Beck’s remarks.
Our goal is to make Los Angeles the safest big city in America…. The vision to achieve that goal is to develop a closed circuit TV (CCTV) infrastructure that spreads throughout the city in combination with license-place recognition and some other things, allowing us to multiply the effectiveness of our police officers.
While the mission is to reduce crime, this is not the only objective. In the London bombings, abroad and domestically, technology is a solution to much more than crime. It is possibly the best way to provide security from terrorism in a large domestic arena that has great public freedom, as we do. Americans will not limit their freedom to the extent that it would take to limit all acts of terrorism. Given that, our next best option is to increase our knowledge base and know what’s going on, and technology allows us to do that.
The public-safety impact and transparency of operationsthese are huge issues in L.A. What does the public think about its police department? Does it operate in secrecy? Or is it transparent, open? You cannot police people through force but through cooperation, through their desire to cooperate with the laws that their representatives have put in place. The only way to do this is through trust and transparency, and technology brings transparency to law enforcement.
MacArthur Park Video Surveillance
Chief Bratton is the greatest leader in modern law enforcementBoston, New York, and now herehe’s terrific success in all of them. Nobody’s perfect, and I’m sure there are things he would do differently, but there’s no doubt that he understands law enforcement better than anyone else.
Why is mesh so important to us? Chief Bratton said he wanted to change MacArthur Parka 40-acre park in downtown L.A.which we had lost over the last 10 years. It had become populated by drug dealers, drug users, prostitutes, and gang members, and the public did not use the park. It was set in an extremely densely populated piece of the community that had no access to recreation.
Over the past 1015 years, the PD had tried to impact what was going on in that park with traditional means: a lot of cops, making a lot of arrests; increase the patrols, and hopefully you’ll abate the problem. Well, the problem was much too stubborn for that. When I took over Rampart, we were arresting literally 300 people a month in that parkevery month, and more in the summer, but to no effect. Neither the crime nor the arrests decreased and, more importantly, the park didn’t change, and people still wouldn’t go into it. It wasn’t working, and we recognized that.
How did video change MacArthur Park?
[Plays Channel 4 News video from 34 years ago five cameras mounted on buildings around the park monitored back at the Rampart Station by a veteran officer who calls in a team of bicycle cops to arrest a man who removes a rock of crack from his mouth. One officer can keep an eye on the entire park. Cameras will watch other parks in the future.]
The park changed much more quickly than any of us anticipated. The cameras give a perception of community, that people care about what goes on in that area, and a perception that law enforcement is actively involved in working that areawhether we are or not.
The video talked about 24-hour-a-day observation. Initially, we did that, but as the park improved, we were able to back that way off. We deployed multiple extra resources to keep up with the arrest load. Violent crime was reduced by 45% in the first year. Homicides went down to the lowest in recorded history for that part of the city. The surrounding areas had reductions in crime, but not to that extent.
Rampart is seven square miles with 400,000 residents. At one time, in the mid-1990s, there were 150 homicides in those seven square miles. Every other day, practically, there was a homicide. In 2004, after increasing traditional policing and adding some pieces of technology, this dropped to 26the lowest amount this division has recorded since we began keeping track.
This marked a dramatic change in public safety and in the way people see where they live. Police work is not just about crime and arrest, it’s about making neighborhoods safe, and allowing people to use public spaces as you should be able to use public spaces. That does so much more for a neighborhood than reduce crime and save property. It allows people to go to school and to workit’s the baseline on which all these other programs in society are built.
We became very excited about technology and its ability not just to make us more efficient in our job, but to get us the end results that we were unable to achieve with more cops, task forces, and arrests. It was amazing to us. I experienced this, and I had no particular interest in technology or its application in law enforcement until I saw this occur.
Southeast Division and Jordan Downs
That brings us to the project that is the focus of this discussion. And that is in Southeast.
[Plays ABC News Video In South Los Angeles, the cops, gangs, the people who grew up here are trapped together. The world looks very different from inside a speeding police car. There is no more dangerous place in America to be a police officerand a young man.]
The Southeast Division is 10 square miles, and the most difficult place in the Southeast Division is a housing development called Jordan Downs, a small public-housing area with an extremely high crime and a resident gangGrape Streetwho is perceived to run the development. There are huge issues between the community and the police. It was the flashpoint for the 1965 riots. It was heavily involved in the ’92 riots. They talked about L.A.P.D. back when it was the murder capital of the United States. Southeast Jordan Downsis the top of the pyramid as far as homicide, gang crime, and challenging policing. You not only have a tremendous amount of the criminal and gang element, you also have a population that is not scared of the gang element but of the police.
When Chief Bratton beganlooking for the next place we could change…. The symptoms of that area of the citygangs, homicides, overall crimethose are symptoms of a breakdown in that community. So how could we change that community? That was when we started talking to Motorola and the Federal Department of Justice about funding (DOJ’s part) and supporting (Motorola) a project to combine a lot of the technology we had begun to use in a number of areas: Hollywood, MacArthur Park, near the beach. We had used cameras in a lot of places, but we wanted to go to the next level, which would require a significant change in technology, and Motorola’s mesh network was the technology we would use.
Mesh networking allows us to put information that we collect via CCTV and closed-circuit surveillance cameras down to the police cars. That’s the huge thing. It will go to the station and the communications division, where we send out the calls, but primarily to the police cars and the people who most need the information.
Our goal was to create a mesh network around Jordan Downs enabling real-time video to be sent to the officers’ laptops. LAPD CIO Tim Riley’s overarching plan for the LAPD has been to put laptops into all the police cars in the Southeast that are more than capable of receiving this information.
But it’s not only about the public safety pieceand the fire trucks and paramedicswe’ll also use the network to provide opportunity. When you achieve public safety, you increase opportunity and you allow communities to grow. The project will also provide Internet access to this piece of Los Angeles that is the most encapsulated part of our population. Multiple generations live in this housing developmentpeople don’t leave. It’s not the goal of society to warehouse folks so they don’t develop, so how do you change that? One way is to make them safe so they can go to school, but the other is to give them access to information and the rest of the worldto what all of us here have every day. You increase public safety and, on top of that, you add opportunity.
We’ll also add license-place and facial recognition technology.
A high school, two middle schools, and multiple elementary schools that are in the immediate vicinity of Jordan Downs will also be affected: They will get Wi-Fi, and the ability to access the Internet, and to put in computer labs that will teach people how to use it. We are actively involved in getting them equipment.
The other piece is Jordan High School, which has the worst attendance record in the school system. Kids are afraid to go to school, because little gangsters will take anything of value from you, and that’s the reality. So one of the things we want to do is increase safe passage to the school, provide opportunity, and increase our ability to take back this area.
[Video continues The center of all gangs is money. Kids drive around and serve as lookouts. From block to block the gangs change, and some are huge2,000 members.]
A huge challenge is that the criminal infrastructure can easily determine when law enforcement is there, and it makes it difficult for us to police. But a mesh network with CCTV eliminates all that. Officers can see from half a mile outside the housing development, and they can respond to it.
There are a number of pluses. They make better arrests. They can go to the right place at the right time and make an intervention. It makes them much safer. They’re able to see what’s going on, whether there are weapons, how many people are involved. It also makes the neighborhood much safer.
The huge challenge in law enforcement is trying to process a huge amount of information as you get it. You get a radio call. There’s a man with a gun, an assault, a location, you get some kind of third-hand description, and then you got there and try to make sense of all this. It’s very difficult. We detain the wrong people all the time based on what we think somebody told somebody else. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out who’s involved in what. This simplifies this incredibly, because you’re eyes on, you see what’s happening, you respond, you’re the one that makes the contact, there’s no secondhand information. It decreases mistakes, which is a huge issue for the public and for us.
The [mesh radio] boxes were developed in Cabrini Green in Chicago. They’re not bullet resistant, but we’ve had good luck with them there. We’re putting them in. They’ll not only have a camera in some of them but there’ll also be some dummies up, and we’ll try to rotate the stock around. Like any other venture, you’ve got to put a toehold in. We may lose a couple at first, but you’ve got to keep putting them. In MacArthur Park, we didn’t lose any….
License-Plate Recognition
We want to do intelligence-based policing. We want to have more information before we take action. That’s what technology is about. How much information can you give me before I take away somebody’s life, liberty or property, which is huge. We want to do the job the best we possibly can, but we need information to do it correctly.
One of the things we will apply in Jordan Downs is Smart Cars. They’re a platform. In southwestern law enforcement, and especially in L.A., we are the undying advocates of car-based response. We’re too small to do it any other way, and the distances are too vast. That’s how we do business, out of police cars. Up until now, it’s been a police car with a radio and computer dispatch system and some weaponsand that’s it. It’s not the kind of office we want to give officers the ability to work out of.
The Smart Cars combine license-place recognitions systems, digital in-car video (a first for a major southwestern law enforcement entity), the ability to receive live video feeds, facial recognition, fingerprint recognition, and a pursuit management system.
Digital in-car video and license-plate scanning.
[Plays video The real-life robo-cop. Cameras hooked up to a computer fix on the dimensions of the license plate and cross-checks against a database for stolen vehicles. With a plate scanner on the job3,000 in a shiftaveraging one stolen car every 12 days. It can be used for outstanding warrants and cars that are not registered. The system does not discriminateit doesn’t care who the driver is.]
This is the perfect application of technology for law enforcement. Running 100200 plates a shift is a lot, and you have to do other things, tootraffic violations, looking for crime, and answering calls for service. It’s not very efficient. The system requires no input from the officer. It runs the plates, and because the database is stored in the car, it runs as fast as it reads. It sounds a verbal alert to the officer, who then has to figure out which car it is. A two-officer unit within six months recovered 130 stolen cars, and out of those 30 were occupied. It also picks up cars parked on the street. In L.A. the vast majority of plates are registered in California.
There are a couple of casinos using this technology in Nevada. This is a huge application we’re starting to explore with a couple of our malls out hereto run cars as they go into parking structures. Does this car belong here? Is it stolen?
The screen appears in front of the officer and changes constantly as the cars are run. It gives a picture of a piece of the caropposing traffic or going away.
The application also collects data. It not only recognizes stolen plates in an instant, it also collects data on what license plate it ran, when and where it ran it. This is a huge application for investigation. Usually you don’t know if a car is involved in crime until you make an arrest. But now you can see where a car has been and how that compares with a crime that has occurred, and all of a sudden we’ve got suspects, and an ability to solve crime, and to prevent this person from preventing more crime.
In the Jordan Downs project, we will have fixed license-plate recognition on-scene, and it will allow us to screen nonresidents outnot to deny them access but just to know when they’re going in. We lose several young men a year in that housing development to rival gang members that come from outside and drive through and shoot somebody. And it’s not always other gang members. This gives us an ability to do something about that if we’re not present….
Jordan Downs is a multi-layered endeavor funded by the city, the federal government, by Motorola, and supported by the community. It will make a huge difference in that area and has made a huge difference in that area. We’re very excited about it, and I know you’ll be seeing more as the project rolls out.