Latest / Technology Now / Public safety and real-time choices: the tech helping New Orleans’ first responders | Ross Bourgeois
Transcript
- ROSS BOURGEOIS So the call comes into the 911 center. every street address or set of intersecting streets are geocoded, so we know the unique geographical coordinates of where that incident is. We know where our cameras are. When that alert takes place, we can see the live comments that the dispatchers and call takers are putting into the incident. Obviously, the map shows us where the camera is in relation to the incident. And then obviously we have , the two-way radios at each one of our positions where we can get on the radio and talk directly to the responders in the field, let them know what we see, let them know what we don't see MICHAEL BIRD and that is just one way in which technology is being utilized by first responders in New Orleans to help them do their jobs effectively and safely SAM JARRELL Wow, it sounds like it's making a big difference. I'll be curious once we get into the interview as to like how this has changed over time the first responders' response to these incidents. so I'm imagining we're doing a case study on that today? MICHAEL BIRD Yes, we are, Sam. I think case study is a pretty fascinating way to actually see technology in action. So this week we are gonna be seeing how technology is being used to make the lives of everyday people in the city of New Orleans safer, assisting first responders when it comes to crimes, accidents, and natural disasters. I'm Michael Bird SAM JARRELL I'm Sam Jarrell And welcome to Technology Now from HPE. MICHAEL BIRD So technology as a tool for first responders is nothing new. Police and forensic scientists use doorbell camera footage to help piece together investigations. Live videos on social media helped first responders find and save people trapped in a collapsed factory after a tornado in Mayfield, and smart watches have been known to detect warning signs of illness before it has a chance to be diagnosed SAM JARRELL Right. And while these are important examples they have led to lives being saved, but they're also pretty small in the grand scheme of things. They're all using technology for individual events MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, exactly. So what if you could scale it up and have a centralized location which specializes in the technological side of crime prevention or disaster relief? Enter the Real Time Crime Center, which you heard about at the top of the show. So a call goes into the nine one one dispatch center, and alongside them, the Real Time Crime Center provides additional data to assist the first responders SAM JARRELL Pretty cool. And you said that this could be used for a lot more than just crime though too, right? MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, absolutely. And anything which requires first responders could benefit from the center's assistance. So think things like a car accident, a fight, a fire, even things like an approaching tropical storm, hurricanes, or floods. So to find out more, I met with Ross Bourgeois, director of the New Orleans Real Time Crime Center, to find out more about how the center is keeping residents safe. But before we get onto the Real Time Crime Center, I wanted to set the scene and start with a little bit of a history lesson on the city of New Orleans. ROSS BOURGEOIS The city of New Orleans is a great American city. It's historic. Our culture, our cuisine is unrivaled. Tennessee Williams has a quote, that , America has but three cities: San Francisco, New York, and New Orleans, and everywhere else is Cleveland. No offense to anybody from Cleveland, but that quote is, true that New Orleans has a character. If you love New Orleans, New Orleans loves you back MICHAEL BIRD and New Orleans is, as you said, is a historic city. is it one of the oldest cities in the US? ROSS BOURGEOIS It is. we were founded in 1815, In fact, the city of New Orleans was founded 100 years before the state of Louisiana was MICHAEL BIRD And, with it being an old city, does it come with challenges in terms of, street layout or utilities, that sort of thing? ROSS BOURGEOIS Absolutely, everything about a historic city comes with challenges, whether it's, as you said, street layout, it's underground utilities. New Orleans is a city that was built below sea level, in a bowl surrounded by water, and we depend on a complicated series of pumps to keep us dry. Everything that's mechanical has its own inherent challenges MICHAEL BIRD And so, you're the director of the Real Time Crime Center. Can you just talk through what the Real Time Crime Center is? ROSS BOURGEOIS So I'm actually the director of public safety support, and one of the things in my portfolio is the Real Time Crime Center. It's probably the most significant one of my responsibilities, and, I was the founder, I was the first employee. we built the Real Time Crime Center in 2017, and stood it up in November of that year. Became a 24-hour operation in February of 2018, and we've been going strong ever since. But the Real Time Crime Center is a 24-hour command center where we leverage technology, namely video cameras, public safety cameras throughout the city, to provide information to our first responders in real time to inform their response to calls. So if you imagine the, our video management system as one island and the computer-aided dispatch over at the 911 center as a second island, we have a piece of technology that bridges the two islands together MICHAEL BIRD And so what are some of the technical challenges with running the real-time crime center? why is it not something that every city has? ROSS BOURGEOIS we're seeing a lot of increase in that now, right? When we came around in 2017, we were not first to the game. There were a lot of cities that had them, that had built crime centers in the years before that. But more so recently, you're seeing a lot in a lot of smaller cities because the, the technology's becoming scalable. but we're an incident-based system, so that 911 center where all those calls are coming in, When we have a camera near one of those calls, we get an alert. And when that alert takes place, our staff doesn't have to remember where 2,000 cameras that are fed into the system are. The technology's going to present the relevant cameras to them. So we're leveraging the technology to make our first responders more efficient and more effective. MICHAEL BIRD So can you just talk through maybe step by step by step, one of those calls? So a call comes in, then what happens? ROSS BOURGEOIS So the call comes 911 center. Obviously, every street address or set of intersecting streets are geocoded, so we know the unique geographical coordinates of where that incident is. We know where our cameras are. So this complicated piece of software does something at its root that's very simple. When there's an incident within a predetermined geographic radius of one of our cameras, we get that alert. And when that alert takes place, we can see the live comments that the dispatchers and call takers are putting incident. Obviously, the map shows us where the camera is in relation to the incident. And then obviously we have the, the two-way radios at each one of our positions where we can get on the radio and talk directly to the responders in the field, let them know what we see, let them know what we don't see MICHAEL BIRD So in a scenario like a, car accident or something, what would the Real Time Crime Center do? what's the benefit of having those cameras? ROSS BOURGEOIS efficiency and effectiveness, you'll hear me say that over and over. our goal is to make our first responders more efficient and more effective. So if a car crash happens at an intersection where we have a camera, we're gonna be able to gather that video of that incident and push it out to those officers to where they perhaps don't have to talk to four or five people on the corner to get their account of what happened when they can actually see it on the video recording. And whether it's to determine who ran a red light, what happened, we can make their day more efficient, and ... If we make their day more efficient, we can become the artificial force multiplier. So if they don't have to go to a gas station and ask them for surveillance footage, they don't have to interview a half a dozen witnesses. Perhaps some of those witnesses, are not unbiased, right? So we can get unbiased information, and if we can return that time back to them, them that's more time that they could spend answering a higher priority call. That's more time they can spend patrolling a neighborhood. And that's how we can make the city more safe. 'Cause if we can give that time back to the police, they can invest it in perhaps somebody's neighborhood, interacting with the community. And when the police interact with the community in a positive light, people trust the police the community trust the police. They trust their government. MICHAEL BIRD and so, what has been the impact, on the city of New Orleans since the Real Time Crime Center's been around? have you seen a reduction in particular crimes? Have you seen an increase in response times, that sort of thing? ROSS BOURGEOIS we see better and more informed responses, right? Because of the information that we can provide to the officers or the responders, we can either speed up a response or perhaps even slow down a response and make it safer. if we're racing to calls and the parties aren't there anymore, we can reduce that response and make it safer for the police or the responders and the community. In terms of, in terms of reduction in crime, crime is cyclical. When crime is down nationwide, crime is down in New Orleans. When crime is up nationwide, crime is up in New Orleans. And over the last 60 or 70 years, that trend is, proven. So it's not about that. It's about making the responders more efficient and more effective. And when we can do that, we're an additional tool in the officer's tool belt. MICHAEL BIRD and is it just, crime that the Real Time Crime Center can be used for? what about things like, natural disasters, things like that? ROSS BOURGEOIS Absolutely. And we're the only real-time crime center in the country that I'm aware of that falls outside of the organizational structure of the police department. So we're in the public safety support services, agency, and the reason for that was intentional, because the technology transcends all the disciplines of public safety, whether that's assisting with root cause determination on a fire or a hazmat incident, whether that's getting an ambulance to one of their patients during a major special event faster because of the roadway conditions or pedestrians or crowd size, Obviously, I talked about the city, being below sea level, so we depend on a complicated series of pumps to keep us dry. So if we start to see street flooding, we can, have a notification process to notify our public works folks, our sewage and water board folks that handle drainage, so that they can pre-stage their assets. We work with our sanitation department on illegal dumping cases. So albeit the word crime is in our name, our technology transcends all of the public safety disciplines as well as, those non-public safety ancillary agencies MICHAEL BIRD so can we just talk technology? I'd love to understand how this actually works from a technology perspective. you have cameras. how does that camera data get fed back to the Real Time Crime Center? ROSS BOURGEOIS The, primarily it's through a, HFC metro ethernet. So the vast majority of our cameras are hardwired through an HFC metro ethernet, and it comes back to our storage servers. We record 'em on-prem, and then obviously we access them through our video management system, and we know which ones to access through our connection to the computer-aided dispatch at the 911 center MICHAEL BIRD so cameras, feed live video data back to a storage server? ROSS BOURGEOIS Yes sir. MICHAEL BIRD And, is there some sort of retention policy, 'cause that must just be thousands and thousands of gigabytes, if not terabytes a day. ROSS BOURGEOIS We have a petabyte of of storage. MICHAEL BIRD okay ROSS BOURGEOIS Now we're not close to filling it up, but we have a petabyte of storage that allows us a lot of flexibility and a lot of scalability MICHAEL BIRD do you have a sense of how much data you're storing in a day or in a week or in a month? ROSS BOURGEOIS So our retention policy is we maintain unarchived video for 30 days. So every 30 days we're deleting a minute 30 days ago. it's a rolling basis. And in that petabyte of storage we're using just shy of half of that. So in any given month, it's half a petabyte MICHAEL BIRD Wow, okay. that is a serious amount of data. So presumably, you have to have a good storage system to be able to manage that amount of data. I mean, fast storage presumably, and you're presumably accessing videos completely at random. ROSS BOURGEOIS : about half the video is in real time. Half of our requests come moments after the video's recorded. but about half of our requests from our public safety partners come, days or weeks later if they're doing an investigation. So we have to have the scalability to access the right video data quickly and effectively MICHAEL BIRD what did this sort of work look like before the Real Time Crime Center came online? ROSS BOURGEOIS So there was very little citywide public safety cameras in the field. so about a year before the Real Time Crime Center opened, about 30 cameras with a total of about just shy of 100 lenses were in the one through 1000 block of world-famous Bourbon Street. but that video was just recording, we were not really operationalizing that. Very rarely would we get a request from the police in a pre-crime center days where somebody have to go back during a business day, at the city's EOC to retrieve that footage for an investigation. So the video was simply just being recorded and then being deleted we were not operationalizing it at all. MICHAEL BIRD so the cameras are sort of like, I guess they're sensors. I mean, in future, would you provide different inputs into the Real-Time Crime Center? ROSS BOURGEOIS So our cameras are all overt, they're out in the field. Our policy requires that every camera is, is overtly a camera. they're not disguised as something else. They all either have to have decals, police decals and/or flashing lights. In most cases they have both down in the historic districts we don't put the flashing lights as much simply Because of the fact that it's historic. We're limited in terms of the poles that are there, so those poles are a lot lower to the ground, so we don't wanna shine that light in anybody's eyes or in anybody's businesses. So those, the ones in the historic district just have decals. but primarily throughout the city they all have decals and lights MICHAEL BIRD And, are you seeing other cities adopting similar approaches? ROSS BOURGEOIS I have the honor to serve on the executive board of the National Real-Time Crime Center Association, where we have several hundred member agencies, and we get together annually at our annual conference and, throughout the year on calls and webinars to talk about the trends, talk about the technology available, and talk about the challenges of in the real-time space. Every real-time crime centera little bit different. and each center is doing what it does based on its community. So where some centers might be heavily in the intel space, some might be heavily in the video space, some might be heavily into the license plate readerspace, they're filling the needs for theircommunity. MICHAEL BIRD What's the future for the Real Time Crime Center? ROSS BOURGEOIS I think drones as a first responder MICHAEL BIRD Wow ROSS BOURGEOIS future, right? it's the drone programs that where you launch a semi-autonomous drone and where you can go where you don't have that camera coverage and provide that same basic information that you would provide from a fixed location, but from the DFR, the drone as a first responder MICHAEL BIRD DFR, the drone as a first responder I guess things like natural ROSS BOURGEOIS Correct. So right now New Orleans, southwestern Louisiana's bracing for a tropical storm. So we'll go into our flood protocols here in the next few days where we're going to be, informing our public safety partners of the locations where we see street flooding so that they can stage their assets, whether that's vacuum trucks or whatnot. Barricades to barricade critical underpasses to keep somebody from driving through flooded waters and the like. So, in police work and public safety, you respond to the next call comes down the tubes the- Mm ... the a natural disaster, a planned major special event or whatnot is, That's what we do MICHAEL BIRD Ross, thank you so much for your time on Technology Now. Thank you. It's been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you ROSS BOURGEOIS Thank you. MICHAEL BIRD It was a really interesting chat and I really love listening to case studies because seeing technology being implemented and how it's being implemented is always quite fascinating. SAM JARRELL yeah i think for me, um, w- what stood out is we've talked about the concept of a smart city to, in the past. I don't know if this quite qualifies or not, but it made me immediately think of one, You know, the story itself is not just about like the cameras or the storage systems or any of that. It's about actually being able to improve life across the city by better responding to all of these, incidents, disasters, whatever it be, and make better decisions when every second counts MICHAEL BIRD if you can respond to something faster and more efficiently, then, perhaps you can save people's lives, you can save property, you can, open streets up faster, and as we know, New Orleans, hit the news in the UK just over two decades ago. My goodness. And that was probably the first time I learnt about how the city was essentially, below sea level and, had the levees and pumps and all that sort of stuff. And so ways that you can, uh, deal with floods and other natural disasters in an efficient way. One of the things that, Ross and I spoke about off mic was about how, actually there are different floodwaters in different places, so different amounts of floodwater. So everyone could call in and say, "My street is flooding," but they could look at the cameras and say, "Ah, well, this street is one foot underwater. This street is three inches underwater. They're not the same level of severity." you can be way more efficient with the finite assets that we have. SAM JARRELL Yeah, the response isn't always necessarily about being the fastest, it's about being more informed and safer about how you respond. and that situations can change rapidly, and so what you need to do, sometimes you actually need to slow down your response because something has, changed and you need to approach it from a more safe approach. the flooding and the hurricanes are still very fresh in a lot of people's minds. I mean, I was in school in Texas when it happened, and as a result our school system started to get tons of kids from New Orleans, that would, had to move to Texas, even if temporarily, because the city was devastated. and this was happening all over Texas because people simply had to relocate. They had no other options at that time. So the idea of like being able to leverage this technology to keep the city safer and to keep the water out, quite frankly, I can imagine it's life-changing for a lot of folks there because that's their home. And for them I'm sure every single year when hurricane season rolls around they have to be reliving some of that, thinking about that and wondering what their game plan is going to be if something happens again. You know, It's called the Real Time Crime Center, but it's much more than crime. There's a lot more that we're able to respond to when we have the right information. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah. it's like disaster response, it's public utilities, it's just a load of other things that actually can help a keep being more efficient. Ross sort of touched on this, you could imagine augmenting different types of sensors. You could, imagine having, flood sensors on streets not just on a camera, but could say, "This, this is what the water level is," or, "This is what the groundwater level is like." He, he mentioned, using drones, particularly during disaster relief or tracking storms and things like that. so you could see that actually if you could add more data into this smart city setup to, to do different things SAM JARRELL Yeah, it's a true public safety sort of city operations platform, honestly MICHAEL BIRD Now, Sam, we've covered a lot of things which the Real Time Crime Center can do. So the final thing I wanted to find out from Ross was, as the director of the center, what does he think is the most important aspect of this technology? ROSS BOURGEOIS without the technology, we would not be able to provide that live ground truths to the first responders the field. So by having the technology in place, by having the 24-hour crime center stood up and activated, we're able to inform those responses, and Those first responders can have more information, and they can have a smarter response. If, for example, a call comes out a burglaryor a robbery at alocation,right now the officer just gets anaddress. Mm.and they drive to that location. But if we have cameras in the area, and we can see a potential suspect leaving a certain way, we can inform that response to make it it safer and more effective. SAM JARRELL Okay that brings us to the end of Technology Now for this week. Thank you to our guest, Ross Bourgeois And of course, to our listeners. Thank you so much for joining us. MICHAEL BIRD If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please do let us know – rate and review us wherever you listen to episodes and if you want to get in contact with us, send us an email to technology now AT hpe.com and don’t forget to subscribe so you can listen first every week. Technology Now is hosted by Sam Jarrell and myself, Michael Bird This episode was produced by Harry Lampert and Eva Higginbotham with production support from Alysha Kempson-Taylor, Nik Damarell Beckie Bird, Alissa Mitry, and Jenessa Ayache. Our theme music was composed by Greg Hooper. SAM JARRELL Our social editorial team is Rebecca Wissinger, Judy-Anne Goldman and Jacqueline Green and our social media designers are Alejandra Garcia, and Ambar Maldonado. MICHAEL BIRD Technology Now is a Fresh Air Production for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (and) we’ll see you next week. Cheers! SAM JARRELL Bye y’all