Time after time people told their stories to the judge -- how they had stopped before the traffic light, how the cop had mishandled the traffic stop -- one excuse after another. After all, it was their word against the officer's. Who was going to prove them wrong?
Then the new flat-panel TV on the wall flickered on, and the defendant got a good look at their traffic stop from the cop's perspective, unfolding in sharp digital video, like their very own reality program. Inevitably the story they'd told didn't match the tape.
"I was there the first night that they used it," Mills said of the 2005 traffic court debut of his department's digital video system. "After about the third or fourth one, people just started getting up and paying their fine. It removes any and all question."
The Humble Police Department had just outfitted its 25 cruisers with a new digital video system, replacing the grainier, bulkier analog video system still common in most cities. With the footage stored digitally, Mills said, logging, searching and sharing video with the district attorney's office is simpler.
With the digital video cameras, Humble police can catch violations on camera, as they happened. While analog systems would begin filming when an officer turned on his sirens and began his pursuit, the new digital system is constantly filming. For the first time, police officers can return to the station with footage that showed why they initially pulled a car over.
Humble is one of the latest in the growing number of Texas cities to outfit their police vehicles with digital, wireless and remote technology built with public safety in mind.
Radio to Robocop
Wireless microphones on utility belts, automatic GPS vehicle locators and dedicated Wi-fi hotspots are key innovations police departments are adopting to keep the streets safe. Better communication, faster response times and more reliable video evidence are just a few of the advantages for police departments that make the jump from radio to Robocop.
In 2004, the Tyler, Texas, Police Department was the guinea pig in the mobile public safety movement as one of seven agencies around the country to install Coban's early digital video recording equipment.
"The first generation, it took a while for the police officers to adapt to it," said Benny Yazdanpanahi, CIO of Tyler. "I think they love it now."
Yazdanpanahi said that after the initial growing pains, adopting the technology has been relatively easy, and the city is one of a handful in the state whose early adoption of technology has been recognized by the Center for Digital Government.
Today Tyler has upgraded to second-generation digital video devices in police and fire units. The city uses GPS to track and manage its public safety fleet, and installed wireless hotspots in town for quick video downloads and a direct connection with the district attorney's office, giving prosecutors on-demand access to video evidence.
Mobile messaging lets Tyler police spend more time patrolling and less time sitting behind a desk. LG Maps gives them access to street directions and aerial photography. Direct access to networks and databases means less time on the radio calling a dispatcher with questions, Yazdanpanahi said. "All of our police, they do their reporting in the car."
Officers can also easily search the digital video archive, and it's made a big difference in Humble, Mills said. When an officer completes a traffic stop, for instance, the driver's name is automatically saved to the video, along with keywords like "speeding" or "school zone." The video is saved on a 60 GB hard drive in the cruiser,
and the officer can upload the video to the Humble police server at a wireless hotspot. At the end of a shift, the officer removes the hard drive and makes one last upload at the station. Humble keeps videos for at least 120 days.
Humble also uses the digital video for its officer training programs, and has wired its interrogation room. When they first made the switch, Mills said the station had allowed four hours to train each officer, but most were finished in an hour and a half. "It's so easy to navigate," he said, "you don't even need to have much in the way of computer skills."
Taking Hold in Texas
Larger agencies, with more vehicles to equip and more people to train, face a steeper challenge and a heftier price tag when switching to digital. For a smaller agency like the Humble Police Department, equipment for 25 cars, along with all new servers and computers cost approximately $300,000, Mills said.
"Budget is an issue of course, but financially I don't think it's more than if you were going to buy a laptop and a camera," said Cindy Chang of Coban Research and Technologies Inc., the Texas-based company that produces the digital video system used by the departments. "But having the IT department go along with it is an issue -- now the video is computer-based, and you need to have that back-end infrastructure involved."
She said Coban works with larger cities like Chicago and Seattle, but most clients are closer to the size of Tyler with a population of about 100,000 people.
The technology is most effective when the information at officers' fingertips is consolidated in a single interface, as it is in Humble, where radar tracking is built into the digital video, keeping a record of how pursuits unfold.
"When we married this Stalker radar system to the Coban," Mills said, "it gave us even more than I'd thought. As it tracks vehicles, it'll actually show at that moment what the vehicle's speed was, and what the officer's speed was. Whatever's going on, you see it."
Mills said every new cruiser his department orders is outfitted with a Mnstar wiring system to support the heavy electric demands of the new equipment, and to isolate electrical problems.
With cities starting to adopt third-generation digital police video systems, and wireless hot zones covering more ground each day, it's getting easier to make the switch. As more agencies test the waters of digital and mobile technology, cities like Tyler will keep looking for new ways to use mobile technology.
Yazdanpanahi said someday, for example, he expects to use GPS to track the entire fleet of city vehicles. "We can put them in our trash trucks and monitor their speeds. We haven't gotten to that point yet," he said, but "we are exploring."
