OGDEN — When Dave Weloth started as a police officer 20 years ago, he would have liked to have had the information he's providing today. Weloth now heads the Ogden Police Real Time Crime Center, a small room of computers in the city's Public Safety Building.
Screens covering two walls show dispatch feeds and live surveillance feeds from public areas around the city.
The screens also feature maps marked with crime data — such as where the most burglaries have occurred and where parolees convicted of burglary are in relation to those hot spots, so officers know where to patrol and who they can talk to for information.
The job of law enforcement is always to reduce crime, and police are always looking for new tools and ways to do that, Weloth says.
He believes the center is just the latest iteration of that mission.
About five years ago, it was the Crime Reduction Unit, a new team of officers and a sergeant whose sole job is to patrol and get to know the heart of the city.
Then, about two years ago, it was the gang injunction, which makes it illegal for known members of the Trece street gang to associate with each other.
Now it's the center, which only cost the department a few thousand dollars to install, thanks to some creative use of space and pieces of equipment that were either hand-me-downs or bought at Costco.
An average of three to five minutes passes from the time an individual calls 911 to the time an officer arrives on scene, and about two of those minutes is the officer's driving time, Weloth says.
That's precious time the officer can spend getting a lot of information about the neighborhood and the suspect from the center, he says.
Weloth related an anecdote about how the center staff was able, through a surveillance camera, to keep an eye on a driver who ran off after crashing near 26th Street and Washington Boulevard. The center related where he was — sitting on a bench some distance away — until officers could catch up to him.
Weloth assures that the center is not Big Brother when it comes to the cameras. The cameras are all in public spaces, and most of the time, he says, the feed is too boring to watch: sparse parking lots, empty bleachers and regular afternoon traffic around town.
In another instance, a man threatened to shoot himself, and the center told responding officers about the neighborhood and the safest routes around the home.
And the night of the Jan. 4 shooting at Matthew Stewart's home, before confirmation of how many officers were wounded or how many suspects there were, Weloth rushed to the center and fed aerial map information to officers en route as they were still planning to search the surrounding area.
Only Weloth was at the center that night, and it was a special circumstance that brought him there. He would like to see the center staffed beyond the current 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday shifts. But right now, the money isn't there, he says.
Weloth also hopes to mobilize the center.
He pulls out his smartphone and demonstrates how he — and other officers — are able to sync the phone's screen to what's on the crime center monitor.
But Weloth would like officers to be able to access a version of the center on their own from the computer in their vehicle.
Much of the data and software that makes up the center's information is free, Weloth says, and it was just a matter of consolidating it.
Similar crime centers have cropped up in places like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, but never had a city of less than 100,000 people adopted the new strategy before Ogden.
Weloth recalls how a U.S. Department of Homeland Security director visited the center earlier this year and was impressed with this new, digital job in the Ogden Police Department.
But Weloth says the department is just doing what it has always been supposed to be doing — reducing crime.
ahowell 18 Sep, 2012
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