North Little Rock expands use of cameras to support police work

Just like their counterparts across the Arkansas River, North Little Rock police have brought a real-time crime center online that uses city and company-owned cameras to expand police’s ability to respond to crimes and identify suspects.

The North Little Rock center, which operates on the same Fusus platform as a similar center that Little Rock police launched in fall 2022, allows police to obtain information about a crime scene even before patrol officers arrive and helps them identify suspects fleeing past posted surveillance cameras, said Sergeant Gary Jones, who is responsible for the center’s daily operations.

“That way they can see it before they get to the scene,” Jones said.

Department officials have been working to get the center up and running for about a year, Jones said, and in May a small room in the North Little Rock Justice Center building became its base of operations.

Detective John Alston, the other officer who works at the center, sat at his desk in that same room on Wednesday and demonstrated how the computers there display on a map of the city the locations of city surveillance cameras, private cameras installed by business owners and active patrol units.

Even if officers at the center do not have access to a camera at the crime scene, they may be able to catch a glimpse of a possible suspect or his vehicle fleeing past a monitored location, making it easier for investigators to work on a case.

Just last weekend, Jones said, officers were able to identify a suspect in a theft with the help of cameras in a participating store, but no arrests had been made as of Wednesday.

As of Thursday, the department’s crime center website, connectnorthlittlerock.org, showed 584 cameras integrated into the center’s system and 138 more registered. That means that while police don’t have live access to the cameras, they know their location and can contact the owners.

About 470 of those integrated cameras are city-owned, Jones said, and some of those are actually Little Rock-owned. The two police departments have some overlap in the city-owned cameras connected to their systems, he said, though none of the private cameras are shared. The idea is to streamline cooperation between the two agencies, Jones said.

The remaining 584 devices belong to companies that agree to buy a Fusus device called a Core and connect it to their camera system, giving police access to the camera images. A Core, which can support up to four cameras, is the smallest device available on the site and costs $350. This includes a one-year subscription to the service, which costs $150 per year.

North Little Rock police have not yet widely publicized the system for registering and integrating the cameras, but that will soon change now that the system is working smoothly, Jones said. City residents who want to register their camera’s location with the center and provide contact information can now do so online.

In the meantime, Alston has been approaching business owners along major streets – all high-traffic areas where there are gaps in the city’s camera surveillance – and telling them about the system to encourage them to participate, he said.

“Most of the time they seize the opportunity,” Alston said.

Currently, Jones and Alston are the only full-time employees at the crime center. Police Chief Patrick Thessing said the department is looking to hire a crime analyst to round out the staff.

Thessing doubts the center will be staffed 24 hours a day in the near future, but with additional staff the department could extend its shifts into the “early morning hours,” he said.

Even if no one is at the center, patrol officers and detectives can send a request to crime center staff to save footage that may be relevant to their investigation.

Jones said knowing where the private cameras are located and being able to easily contact the owners to view the footage saves investigators a lot of time, which would otherwise require them to knock on doors and hope that someone with a camera system might catch a glimpse of an incident or suspect.

Alston, who worked in the department’s patrol division and property crime unit before joining the crime center, expressed optimism about the opportunities the crime center will provide officers now that it is operational.

“Every day is bigger and better,” Alston said.

North Little Rock Police Detective John Alston shows a map of North Little Rock and the locations of public and private cameras at the North Little Rock Justice Center on Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Thomas Metthe)