New CrimeReports™ Camera Registration Leverages Citizen-Sourced Information to Fight Crime
Salt Lake City, Utah (PRWEB) April 23, 2014 -- PublicEngines, a provider of cloud-based solutions that facilitate crime analysis, supply actionable intelligence and increase community engagement for law enforcement, schools, and governments today announced that it has added a new feature to its popular CrimeReports public crime map that allows citizens to privately register the location of their security cameras with local law enforcement.
Developed in conjunction with Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, the CrimeReports Camera Registration feature is designed to help law enforcement agencies by identifying the location of commercial and residential security cameras so that when incidents occur, law enforcement can quickly know where to turn for potentially valuable video footage.
“The Sheriff’s Electronic Eye program has been some time in the making, and we are excited to launch it and partner with our communities to not only deter, but also solve crime going forward,” said Scott R. Jones, Sheriff of Sacramento County. “Our relationship with PublicEngines is a great example of public-private partnership in creating innovative solutions that enable law enforcement and improve public safety.”
Camera Registration is available to citizens through CrimeReports.com. To join the program they simply set up an account and share basic information about their home and business security cameras – like location, description, and contact information. That information is private and only visible to the law enforcement agency, which can contact those individuals if a crime has occurred in the area and needs to request access to video footage.
“Information is the life blood of law enforcement work,” said William Kilmer, CEO of PublicEngines. “This feature allows agencies to quickly look up an area where a crime has occurred, locate registered cameras, and contact that camera owner to see if they can help provide important video information.”
The company stressed that the information provided by citizens is not published to CrimeReports.com nor made publically available anywhere. All information is held in a secure data center and provided to law enforcement through PublicEngines’ CommandCentral Analytics product, allowing them to view the locations of registered cameras relative to crimes. In addition, the video itself is not made available through this platform as it needs to be physically shared by the camera owner.
The concept for Camera Registration came from Sacramento County Sheriff’s office, which suggested adding it to CrimeReports.com. CEO Kilmer commented, “It has been our vision that CrimeReports is more than a one-way communication stream. That is why we built anonymous public tipping into CrimeReports. When the Sacramento County Sheriff’s office approached us with the idea of citizens registering their cameras, it fit very well with our continued philosophy that CrimeReports should be a two-way information exchange. We are happy to see that come to fruition through this feature.”
To facilitate adoption, Sacramento County Sheriff’s office is making window stickers available for citizens who register for the program in an effort to promote their participation among fellow citizens and also act as a deterrent to would-be criminals.
Camera Registration is a feature of CrimeReports, the most adopted crime mapping solution in the world, and is currently only available for the area Sacramento County area. PublicEngines expects that it will be rolled out to other agencies in the near future. For more information on the Camera Registration, visit https://www.crimereports.com/v3/camera_registration#/. Agencies interested in rolling out Camera Registration when it is broadly available should contact PublicEngines at sales(at)publicengines(dot)com.
About PublicEngines:
PublicEngines develops easy-to-use, cloud-based software that helps law enforcement, government, defense, and other organizations gather, analyze, and share intelligence to improve public safety. Used by more than 2,000 organizations worldwide, our market-leading solutions are accessible wherever you are, and are easy-to-deploy with minimal training and no additional IT burden or expense. For more information visit http://www.publicengines.com.
Public Relations, PublicEngines, http://www.publicengines.com, +1 8018282708, [email protected]
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