ST. CLOUD, Fla. – Artificial Intelligence has made its way into local law enforcement’s use of interconnected cameras to make thousands of video feeds infinitely more valuable.
The A.I. technology can find just about anything that police are looking for in seconds without having to watch all of the feeds.
St. Cloud Police Chief Douglas Goerke showed News 6 what he calls the power of artificial intelligence inside his Real-Time Crime Center.
As an example, he selected a single traffic camera amongst the more than 7,000 video feeds funneling into the Crime Center and searched for a red car over a 24-hour timeframe.
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It’s like finding a needle in a haystack - the needle is the red car and the haystack is the thousands of vehicles that passed through the intersection.
“So any type of critical incident that occurs, vehicular homicide, kidnap vehicle, or someone in the [red] vehicle is a suspect,” Goerke said. “We can bring those up in real time to identify the suspect we’re looking for and then move through that very quickly. We could share that in with license plate readers and within seconds have 16 different results in one camera.”
How long would it have taken to scan 24 hours of video and identify 16 red cars?
“You think about that, my goodness, to even start with one detective or two detectives, you take this bank of time, you think about that having to watch traffic 24 hours straight,” Goerke said. “I probably would have to use four or five detectives to break it down. You think about that your eyes deteriorate and you get tired and might miss something. This is giving it to us in real time and doing it for us just through the A.I. component. I could have those detectives out doing interviews, going out and hitting the streets and getting more information about the criminal activity.”
The video-integration software is called FUSUS, where the more than 7,000 camera feeds from schools, intersections and other law enforcement agencies across Central Florida stream into one dashboard displayed on a wall of monitors. But the magic is the A.I. component, giving detectives the ability to pinpoint a person or car at a particular point in the footage almost instantaneously.
Chief Goerke demonstrated another example, this time searching for a suspect.
“We can actually pick top [clothing] color, bottom [clothing] color, a male or female, if she has a backpack or bag or something else, a hat,” Goerke said.
Race is not one of the characteristics that detectives can use to search for a suspect.
“And it never is,” Goerke said. “That has nothing to do with it. We’re looking for potential clothing description based on what witnesses said or what a victim might give us. So we use that.”
In five seconds, the FUSUS software with A.I. found dozens of people matching the clothing description. And - a surprise - a person in motion.
The software found a person matching the search characteristics riding on a motorcycle.
Goerke said detectives scanning cameras might not have caught that.
“So what if that person jumped on a motorcycle and started riding away, we would not have known that,” Goerke said.
Detectives can also use the A.I. component to set an alert if they’re expecting or hoping a particular vehicle or suspect will pass in front of any of their cameras in the future. If the software identifies the vehicle or suspect, it will notify detectives.
Is there any downside to using A.I. in this fashion? Goerke does not believe so.
“It’s important to know this is a tool only, not something we use for confirmation,” Goerke said. “We use it for a tool. If we come up with something and say hey that seems to be the vehicle, let’s run the license plate and put it in the tag reader and gather more information. It’s another thing we will do on top of that to make sure this is the right vehicle.”
Goerke said some violent crime in St. Cloud is down as much as 25% since the A.I. software started finding needles in haystacks.
He said detectives are solving some crimes faster and solving crimes that otherwise might have gone unsolved.
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