The Orange County Register: Irvine receives $2 million in state funding for Real Time Crime Center

Hanna Kang, The Orange County Register

The city of Irvine is beefing up technology within its police force to track crime quickly and create more opportunities to be proactive, officials said.

With the help of $2 million in funding from the state, the Irvine Police Department will establish a Real Time Crime Center that “embeds” crime analysts in its dispatch center. The funds will go toward equipping the center with new software, hardware and the expansion of the existing dispatch center, officials said.

“Over the course of the last few years, the state of California has certainly seen an uptick in criminal activity. The city of Irvine has certainly not been exempt of some of these criminal trends that have impacted the quality of life for Irvine residents, businesses and other important stakeholders,” Irvine Police Chief Michael Kent said. “Essentially, the (Real Time Crime Center) combines technology, historical data, real time data, time-serious intelligence, analysis and collaboration to combat criminal activity as it is happening.”

The center will help curb current crime trends in Orange County, including organized retail theft and motor vehicle and motor vehicle accessory theft, said Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, who helped secure the funding in the state budget.

The crime center will emulate the city’s traffic management center located within City Hall, a room where personnel monitor in real time traffic circulation throughout Irvine and make adjustments, said city spokesperson Linda Fontes.

Purchasing the hardware and construction costs will be around $650,000, software costs around $810,000 and camera and maintenance costs approximately $540,000, Fontes said.

Once completed, crime analysts will be able to watch on a new ultra-wide screen display real-time footage from CCTV feeds, drones and automated license plate readers. Kent said it is his hope the center will be fully operational within the next four to six months.

The center will allow for more extensive collection of data and robust sharing of that data within the city and surrounding cities that will help police streamline investigations, Kent said.

“The crime analysts will gather information that’s potentially coming from drones, responding officers or the reporting party, take that information, run it through the (Real Time Crime Center) and be able to connect different patterns, crime trends and clues,” Kent said. “Then they’ll put everything together and pass that on to our personnel so that officers have a good understanding of what they’re responding to.”

Using the Irvine Spectrum as an example, Kent said given the location of the shopping center between two freeways, it’s easy for someone to get off the freeway, commit a crime and jump back onto the freeway before police show up. But with the Real Time Crime Center, analysts could watch exactly what is happening at the Spectrum and immediately pass that information along to responding officers.

Police could also use available information to be proactive, Kent said. “If we know that certain criminal enterprises are targeting certain locations in certain times on certain days of the week, we can heavily enforce that area.”

Currently, the Irvine Police Department deploys around 300 security cameras in the city, which is just shy of 70 square miles, Kent said. That’s a drop in the bucket, especially when compared to the city of Beverly Hills, which has more than 2,000 security cameras for a land area that covers less than 6 square miles, he said.

“We’re significantly behind as far as the camera technology, so we do want to increase it,” Kent said. “But we don’t want to say our target is, let’s say, 1,000. We want to make sure we understand how many cameras are needed and strategically place them instead of just flooding the area and wasting money.”

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department is also working on getting its own real-time crime center up and running and has offered local agencies access to it, Kent said.

State Sen. Dave Min also secured another $990,000 in funding for the Real Time Crime Center to go toward new dispatch equipment. Current patrol vehicles will be replaced with electric vehicles, and the Criminal Investigation Division Unit will receive additional public safety equipment.

“We have some of the safest cities in the country in this community,” Min said. “We need to continue to fund new efforts, new initiatives.”

Irvine Mayor Farrah Khan said the Irvine Police Department’s efforts to keep the community safe, including creating the Real Time Crime Center, make would-be criminals think twice.

“It will amplify our message for anyone who is thinking about committing a crime in Irvine. Don’t do it,” Khan said.

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