An armed robber has taken a woman hostage and holed up somewhere in an East L.A. liquor store. The police have been notified, and a SWAT team from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is suiting up to intervene. First, they deploy a robot equipped with three cameras to survey the store's interior. They also mount tiny remote wireless cameras on windows and under doors. The imagery feeds into a sophisticated ad hoc network, which quickly and seamlessly fuses data from the robot, cameras, and other sensors into a virtual-reality crime scene, accessible to officers, commanders, and outside experts no matter where they happen to be. From their PDAs, the team members can view near real-time video imagery, while their field commander, located several miles away, also has a clear picture. A hostage negotiator who happens to be traveling on the East Coast logs into the network from a cyber cafe. Within an hour, and without a single shot being fired, the SWAT team convinces the robber to surrender and release the hostage unharmed.
Welcome to the future of law enforcement. Though the above scenario is not yet a reality, it soon may be if Captain Charles (Sid) Heal has his way. He's the head of the LASD's Special Enforcement Bureau, where he's created an innovative technology development project. His six-man technical-assault SWAT team scouts out new law enforcement equipment, which they then evaluate in the field, working closely with vendors and tech developers as the prototypes go through design iterations. The nonstop vetting and analyses have turned Heal's bureau into a kind of international test bed for new police technology. His office fields hundreds of inquiries from other police departments around the country and even overseas, curious about their work.
But why do cops need the kind of hardware more generally associated with sophisticated military invasions? "The fact is, the crooks have reached parity with us," Heal says. Increasingly, his squads are coming up against criminals using video surveillance systems, night-vision cameras, motion detectors, and other advanced apparatus. In an era when the usual suspects include international terrorists and when even small-time drug runners tote machine guns, the ideas and technologies flowing from Heal, his crew, and his contractors portend a critical departure for big-city law enforcement.
The vision extends well beyond improving discrete weapons and tools: the team is now evaluating the first pieces of a "cyber command post" that would give everyone from street cops on up the chain of command a common operating picture of the crime scene. Without such technology, Heal says, "my great fear is that we're going to end up in a big gunfight with only the same tools as the suspects."
RSS