New High Tech Riverbank Surviellance Cameras Go Beyond Capturing Footage

Remote Surveillance Units have been installed in Riverbank, Calif., and they have the power to do much more than just capture footage. These high-tech surveillance cameras can detect when a crime is being committed, and even allow police officers to communicate with the offender.

• By Kaitlyn DeHaven
• Jun 28, 2019

Riverbank installed new, high-tech cameras this week that can do much more than just capture footage for officer to analyze. The cameras can detect when a crime is committed, and the track the vehicle the offender takes to escape the scene. Furthermore, officers can speak to the offender through two-way audio in the camera, which could help halt the crime without even dispatching an officer.

The technology was developed by a Ceres-based company named Intellisite whose product has been used for security at three of the last four Super Bowls.

Mario Campos, the CEO of Intellisite, said these Remote Surveillance Units can identify more than 300,000 patterns of human behavior that the company writes into the program.

“We can actually make those cameras intelligent and be able to differentiate between maybe a backpack being left behind, which could be a threat to the city,” Campos said.

Riverbank has relatively light police coverage, with 0.74 sworn deputies for every 1,000 residents. Riverbank Police Chief Erin Kiely said this coverage is pretty light, and the cameras will help offset this imbalance so they can do more with less.

According to The Modesto Bee, the cameras can also be armed with license plate readers that search a Department of Justice database and notify law enforcement when a wanted vehicle drives by one of the cameras. Similarly, if an officer needs to retrace the travel of a waned vehicle through the city, the license plate number can be entered into the database. If only a partial plate number if available, it will generate video of all matching vehicles, which can be narrowed down by paint color or make and model.

“A lot of our calls for service are at businesses where we have ongoing thefts,” Kiely said. “We have to go after the fact and piece together what happened, so having the ability to see what vehicles came and went and see who was in them is a huge asset.”

The cameras have been installed in some cities neighboring Riverbank, including Stockton, Modesto, and Sacramento.