Plainsboro Township has received an $80,000 camera surveillance system from the federal government that officials hope will take crime fighting to the next level.
The long-range standalone camera surveillance system, funded through a grant from the Department of Homeland Security’s Commercial Equipment Direct Assistance Program, is different from a regular security camera in that it does not just record passively. Complete with a GPS tracking system, the cameras contain built-in alarms and filtering systems so that police are notified as soon as suspicious activity occurs. The cameras also have their own power source and are wirelessly hooked up to a computer to provide feedback.
The security system — manufactured by Alexander Road-based SightLogix, which was awarded the contract by the federal government — can also store and catalog all of the information by turning it into a format that can be transferred to other computers, which is used to determine the type of incidents that are occurring.
“They’re very proactive because of the alarming feature,” said Lieutenant Jay Duffy of the Plainsboro Police Department. “It’s not that we’re retroactively trying to gather information from it about a situation.”
Police are able to set parameters and filters on the cameras to pick up certain factors, and they can filter areas of view so that the cameras will trigger the alarms for particular factors. “If a person comes into that area, you can set parameters as to the direction the person is traveling in, the size of the person, how long they stayed in that area,” and more, Duffy said. “You can filter out people and just see cars. You can filter out animals or leaves or something traveling in a certain direction. It causes fewer false alarms.”
For example, if police set the cameras up to prevent looting at a construction site, they can set the parameters so that the camera will pick up human activity on the site after a certain time period. So, if someone is on site overnight when he or she is not supposed to be there, the camera will sound an alarm back to the computer laptop controlled by police, and “we’ll know that something’s going on there, so we can deploy the officers to the location.”
“Once a camera does hit on what you set it up for, it records at a very high resolution for identifications reasons to try to figure out who it is,” Duffy added.
Plainsboro Police plan to use the cameras for day-to-day police work. “The cameras are going to be used for surveillance of potential search warrant targets,” he said. This way, police can survey the site, gather information on how many people may be in the building and what police will be dealing with.
The cameras can also be used in cases in which agencies around the state are at a heightened alert from the federal government, which is why the grant came from the Department of Homeland Security. The cameras can be used to look out for a particular type of terrorist activity, and Plainsboro Police can place them in areas in the township where they believe there will be a higher potential for something to occur, Duffy said.
Duffy said police have already received training in using the cameras and will have access to technical assistance from SightLogix in the future. This is the second grant the township received from the DHS. The first came in 2007.
