Improving situational awareness for police officers
When police officers respond to calls for service, they frequently have very little information at hand. They know the location and receive a brief description of the event. They often arrive at the scene with very little detail—making the situation less safe.
Thanks to advanced technology, responding to incidents with scant information is becoming a thing of the past. Over the last several years, Microsoft has partnered with several progressive law enforcement agencies around the world to develop a set of capabilities known as Microsoft Aware.
Aware uses Microsoft’s modern Azure capabilities including big data and business intelligence platforms to help first responders develop a common operating picture based on aggregated data from multiple sources. By connecting to gunshot sensors, for example, Aware can not only alert police officers when a gun has been fired, but also correlate that alert with additional information such as license plate readers (LPRs), 911 call information, warrant and arrest data. The resulting capability allows officers and their command staff to understand the context of the alert with much greater detail. By connecting that information with real-time footage from video cameras placed around the city–whether they are mounted on a pole, in a vehicle’s dashboard, or body-worn on an officer—Aware can automatically rewind the video cameras closest to the alert so police officials can quickly see what is happening in the area before, during, and after the shot was fired.
Aware can be connected to geospatial data to show the exact location of nearby critical infrastructure and facilities such as schools and subway stations. This allows officers to immediately understand if there are additional considerations needed when responding to a call for service. Aware also supports maps, photography and descriptions of critical infrastructure to allow an officer to navigate unfamiliar territory.
One recent Aware deployment is in São Paulo, Brazil. By indexing large amounts of information and creating associations between different data sources such as video cameras, stolen vehicles, missing persons, criminal records, and LPRs, São Paulo police can now get to the scene faster—armed with the information they need to effectively fight crime.
For example, if a suspect flees in a car and a witness or an LPR camera captures only part of the license plate, Aware will locate all vehicles with that partial license plate number and display past LPR hit locations on a map as well as on a calendar (temporal analysis). Pattern analysis of this data allows an officer to quickly determine where and when to look for the suspect. As Fernando Grella Vieira, São Paulo State Secretary for Public Security, put it, “This system will allow a leap in the quality of the police investigation.”
Over the coming months and years, Microsoft will make these capabilities available to more police departments around the world, helping them to fight crime far more effectively than was possible in the past. To learn how technology can improve public safety, please see our Safer Cities website or contact us at: jpsinfo@microsoft.com. Interested in learning more, request a trial: Azure Government Trial, Office 365 Government Trial.
