.svg){kind=small}
Host: Allen Perez
Channel Link: https://www.spreaker.com/show/real-time-talk-with-fusus
Allen Perez:
What's going on, everyone? This is Allen Perez from Fusus. Today I have the pleasure to speak with the Chief of the Chester Pennsylvania Police Department in the Tenth edition of our monthly podcast segment, ‘Real-time Talk with Fusus’. So Chief, first off, can you tell us a little about yourself and your role at the Chester Police Department?
Chief James Nolan:
Okay. Well, I'm James Nolan. I'm hitting almost my 30th year in law enforcement, mostly with the City of Chester Police Department, which is the one city in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. The county consists of townships, boroughs, and one city. It was the original site where William Penn landed. He built the City of Chester and then rebuilt Philadelphia in much the same style but much larger scope. So it has been an occupied area within the State of Pennsylvania since the inception of Pennsylvania. Up through World War II, it was an industrial area, it had a shipyard. Ford Motor Company had a plant there. And much like most things in the '70s, it fell on hard times and became more like most of the formerly industrialized cities that we know today.
I served in the police department there for 24 years, with my last four being Chief of Police. I then was hired by the district attorney to come to the county and run his investigative division through the county Criminal Investigations Division. I still keep a close relationship with the city, obviously it's within the county's purview, and we prosecute a lot of crime there unfortunately. Chester has the highest incarceration rate in the State of Pennsylvania according to recent articles that were just printed.
Allen Perez:
So to really get started today, Chief, in your experience in the law enforcement field, what type of evolution have you seen in law enforcement technology over the years?
Chief James Nolan:
Well, see, the thing that used to happen was the police would be out in the communities, more close... I should say the police would be in the communities embedded, on foot beats, on horses, prior to the advent of telephones and that kind of thing. Once the telephone came about, you could call the police to come where you were. And eventually the automobile came along. They put the cop inside it, and they got places faster but they lost a bit of the connection. So there's always been this fight the entire time that I've been involved in law enforcement, since the early '90s, was what's better community policing, or almost like a occupying force structure. The argument's gone back and forth both ways. The obvious answer is a little bit of both. There has to be a community involvement and there has to be an authoritative position of the police.
What I have seen throughout my career is that the position of the public has changed dramatically. In the beginning of my career, and from what I'm told by people much older than me and that did the job a lot longer, is that the community was far more engaged, far more willing to cooperate, far more willing to come to court, far more willing to do all the things that you need to successfully stop and prosecute crime. During my career, I saw a slip in that. People don't want to get involved. People didn't want to talk. It would be for a myriad of reasons we could discuss for hours on end, but the public involvement became far less towards this portion of my career than it was in the beginning. So there had to be a way to combat that. And we're now dealing with a lot of video technology surveillance equipment, cameras on the police, cameras on the dashes. There's cameras, cameras, cameras, cameras all over the place. And then it becomes, how do you use these cameras to best solve crime?
Allen Perez:
Yeah, for sure. And so to kind of go off that idea, what are some of the major advantages that you have seen from intelligence led policing and community oriented collaboration to assist law enforcement, specifically like a community such as Chester, Pennsylvania?
Chief James Nolan:
Well, due to lack of cooperation of the public, we embarked on a campaign to put more cameras out. And we looked around at different models and ideas, and of course there was a big push for body cameras, body cameras, body cameras. But what I found in researching it was the body cameras didn't help you solve crime, and our problem was crime. It wasn't like, "What are the police doing?" The benefit in solving a crime from a body cam versus its cost effectiveness is near nothing. What you do get is you get to know what the cops are doing when they're doing it, and that's generally not helpful in solving a particular crime. It may give you answers in some use of force event or some similar thing, but it doesn't affect the crime rate.
So in the city of Chester, while I was there in the capacity that I was, we came up with a plan to put as many cameras in public areas as was possible and legal. So we did that, but the problem is incorporating, getting, dealing with redaction, dealing with all the things you have to do in using cameras. And also, when you're going around asking for the public's help, the public may have a surveillance camera, say, a pizza shop, sandwich shop, whatever. They have cameras or even private citizens may have cameras around their home. It's getting the use of those that became our problem. We would spend more man hours chasing cameras than we would actually working on the crime or doing crime scene investigation, i.e., blood spatter, fingerprint, pulling examinations, ballistics examination. That stuff all takes time, but what began to happen was that we were spending more time chasing video than we were doing the other parts of the case.
Allen Perez:
So Chief, one topic I did want to touch on today is, how is your department specifically utilizing law enforcement technology such as a platform like Fusus?
Chief James Nolan:
So we were faced with the problem of, what do we do with all this video? How do we handle it? How do you apply man hours? And how do you obtain video from private citizens? A hundred methods were tried and failed. There were sign up programs, and the DA's office would come with some idea to have a registry, or... There was a million different things and none of them actually got us anywhere.
During the George Floyd incidence, which, again, we could go on for days about what happened there, but the thing that I most benefited from was I found out that they had this system in Minneapolis that fused camera technology. So in a moment of curiosity I called there, asked what they use, and they directed me to Fusus. And I was astounded. As I looked at what Fusus said it could do, I couldn't believe it, anything was possible. Because of the dealings that I've had with other companies, other programs, other ideas, it seemed impossible to integrate any and all camera systems, both public and private, and make that work. I was assured by folks at Fusus that it did work, so we entered into a trial agreement in which we are now. We now have it up and running in the City of Chester.
Now, Delaware County, much like all of Pennsylvania, is very localized. And by that I mean, in the State of Pennsylvania, most of the counties have localized police departments, down to the smallest borough. Which means you may have a police department that is in a part-time capacity, that has two or three employees, and very little financial opportunities to increase their footprint, so the county will tend to step in and help them. Getting everybody on the same page is very difficult. But I found with this, when we put this in Chester, we started to see some success. There's a little buzz that perhaps this could work.
Now, I wanted to have something that was up and running so I could show people. So we pressed it in Chester, we have it up and running, and now we're working on the expansion phase and usability factors. But from the time we had it up and running, we solved, I think, two or three murders, a kidnapping, and a shooting within the first two weeks of having it up and running and having the ability to check different cameras and things.
When I tell you this is the best technology I've seen to this point, I'm not kidding. The way I sold it on our end... Because it's a financial investment and it's a commitment, a commitment of current and future funds, which no one ever has, and no one wants to spend, and very difficult to get money freed up to do things in police work. But when I went to our council people and mostly the district attorney... The district attorney of Delaware County, Jack Stollsteimer, was instrumental in backing me on getting this up and running. But what I said was, "Since the advent of the automobile, this is the biggest technological advancement in police work because the car put us someplace quick, this puts us everywhere all the time, even when people don't want to cooperate with us." So I felt it was a worthwhile endeavor and so far it is. Now, we're working on our expansion phase.
Allen Perez:
So one idea I did want to touch on today revolves around the idea of privacy. And when I talk about privacy, I feel like there's a misguided perception among communities that when a platform such as Fusus is installed that it invades on people's privacy. Can you kind of touch on that idea today and also speak to the privacy aspect there in that Chester, Pennsylvania, community specifically when platforms like Fusus has been installed?
Chief James Nolan:
Everything about public safety versus freedom is a balance between safety versus privacy. So every time you weigh a Fourth Amendment case or write a search warrant or do anything involving people's freedom, there's a balancing act of what's safe versus what is pure liberty. Now, what we have done is to ensure that they would only be in public places. If I were a person standing on a corner of, name a place, 5th and Main, whatever, and I'm standing on this corner and I see something, I could tell the police that that happened and I'm now the witness. All this does, from my perspective, is take out the middle man. We now can just look at the camera, see what the thing was that happened, and act accordingly.
The Big Brother-ism I think would come in if you started to get involved in people's private affairs, putting them in places where the public generally couldn't see. But any street corner, any public building, these are all places where a person could tell the police the information anyway. All this is doing, again, from my perspective, is it's cutting out the middle person and the police officer can just look at the video from that area and act accordingly.
Allen Perez:
No, for sure. And so to kind of touch on that idea, what are some of the ways your department is continuously striving to stay relevant with all of this new cutting edge trends in law enforcement technology today?
Chief James Nolan:
Anyone involved in law enforcement has to try to keep up with the crooks, so to speak, but the criminal mind is always ahead of the law enforcement mind. It has to be. It's just the nature of things. They're trying to get away with something that you're sworn to enforce. As the technology ups for the criminal element, it has to up for the law enforcement element. And if we are dealing with a citizenry that won't cooperate, won't serve as witnesses, won't tell the police what's going on in a particular area, then we have to up our standard and find a way to do that. And video technology has been one of the best ways to do it, and then the advent of the computers that aid the video just speeds things up, makes things better.
Now, these things have been going on in law enforcement for probably the past 20 years, these fusion centers, and real-time crime centers, and all this kind of stuff. But what I found, and the reason that I had pushed Fusus so much... And I caution to say I'm not an employee of Fusus, I didn't know what Fusus was before I saw the Floyd stuff.
But I want to say that in all the things that I've looked at in 30 years, this is the first thing that integrated everything from... There's a system we call a CAD, where the dispatch center puts a call in. So 911 is alerted in whatever fashion, then the call goes out to the police. Well this is the first thing I saw that could incorporate right into that system so that you're getting real-time information immediately to the people on the street. There's not some area or some building where they have to radio what they're seeing. And I mean, you can have that option too, but this technology, I was impressed with the fact that it could give you, on a smart device or a laptop or whatever you had in your mode of transportation in the police world, the information real-time.
So the police officer gets a call by, whatever, robbery in progress, say they can immediately see the store. If the store is hooked up the Fusus, they can see the place where it's happening and they have the information they need. It's not a secondhand description, which, again, adds time and difficulty to solving a crime. Now, my mandate is to solve crime, so I'm going to lean more towards the side of, "Give us a little more leeway," than the privacy aspect. Now, as a citizen, I obviously want my privacy, but, again, there's that balancing act of, what do you give more to to be safe? And I would say in the public realm, we're not putting anything anywhere you wouldn't have a normal person see it. So I don't see any harm in it.
Allen Perez:
No, for sure. And sort of when we close today, what advice would you have for any other city or agency that is looking to evolve their law enforcement technology within their department?
Chief James Nolan:
Don't waste money. There's a lot of time and effort and finances spent on crime solving equipment. My advice would be, obviously, to do your homework as much as possible, but don't buy products just because you know the person, like the person, or so-and-so has it. Look at the equipment, look what's available, is there anything better on the market? Why is this the best thing for me? And does it fit in my price point?
The difficulty that I see is that people like to go with what they're familiar with rather than just do a search and find the best thing. And I feel like I've done that here. I hope I've done that here. I'm sure the folks at Fusus will tell me I've done that here. But I haven't seen, in my time doing this, especially in dealing with video technology, anything that competes with this particular thing. So I would recommend it for people to look at first so they're not wasting their time, money, and effort on things that kind of half do some of the stuff that this does, where this particular product I've found, so far, does everything necessary.
And even when we found problems like, for instance, the City of Chester had a particular problem with public dumping. And I'm sure that's elsewhere as well, but industrial people, construction people, just citizens, or someone clearing out a house would find places just to dump their trash, and it became a major problem. The citizens of Chester complain about this constantly. And the city workers would end up spending more time picking up trash than they would fixing the streets. So you can see the problem there. We told Fusus about this. They were able to integrate an area to look at hotspots, to put portable cameras in places, to make that one of the overliers on the map that you could look up, where's the public dumping problems? And we caught one in the first two weeks of putting this together. I mean, just completely by accident. And it turned out to be contractor from another area, not from the city, came in the city to dump their stuff.
And obviously, want that to grow, but the point I'm trying to make by saying that is that Fusus was open to some random idea from us, the user, to say, "Hey, we have this particular problem. Can you guys put your heads together and come up with a solution for it?" And they accomplished that, which I found to be impressive.
Allen Perez:
Yeah.
Chief James Nolan:
And I can't express enough, and I think I kind of rambled through it, but there's a point where I was telling you how parochial or how localized government is in Pennsylvania. And I don't know, I'm sure that your podcast would be nationwide, and some places can't understand how localized government can get. So you have to be able to come up with a system that can be advantageous to everyone in the group. But if you put the question to the group, you're going to get 50 different answers. So putting people in a position like I'm in at a county level, I would impress upon them if they were going to go with something like the Fusus platform, you push it at a larger level than just localized.
Allen Perez:
Thank you so much, Chief Nolan, for spending some time to talk with me today. And all listeners, please make sure to check out our website monthly for new episodes of ‘Real-time Talk with Fusus’. I hope you all have a great day and thank you all again for listening to the Tenth edition of ‘Real-Time Talk with Fusus’.
