21 Century Crime Fighting: Behind The Scenes With The Anaheim PD
Often called the "Disney Police" because of its proximity to Disneyland, the APD is no Mickey Mouse operation. Instead, the department can quickly process, store and call up digital images related to local crime scenes. Those images are stored in an infrastructure that includes an on-site capacity of 20 Tbytes—which is five times the storage capacity of the rest of the city of Anaheim. The infrastructure also has another 20 Tbytes of mirrored data sitting off-site for disaster recovery purposes and is in the process of adding 70 Tbytes of Blu-ray disk for archiving.
Earlier this year, Everything Channel had the opportunity to go behind the scenes with the Anaheim Police Department and Linear Systems. Guiding the tour was Chris Parsons, president of Linear Systems; Stephen Monteros, COO of Linear Systems and James Conley, forensics services supervisor in the Investigations division of the APD.
Linear Systems works with about 400 police agencies around the country. Its largest customer is the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, which currently has two 100-Tbyte systems for storing 2 million original images, or about 8 million total images with copies.
Conley became a forensics supervisor 13 years ago when the department was still dealing with camera film. In 1998, when the APD first started working with digital cameras, a key question was how to store the images. About that time, a meeting with Linear Systems convinced Conley that his department needed some type of digital management system. The next task was to convince his supervisors.
"When we met, I had an 8-inch floppy disk, a 5-1/4-inch floppy disk, a Zip disk and a couple others," he recalled. "I threw them all on the table and said, 'Here, pick your technology. And oh, this is no longer available and this is no longer available.' They got the point. We went with DIMS because we could see that for 10 years we'd be OK. We also knew that in five years from that time, we'd need to look at this again," he added.
Linear Systems developed the Digital Imaging Management System (DIMS) software and integrates it with industry-standard hardware. Everything in DIMS is based on standards, Parsons said. For instance, homicide records need to be stored forever, while other types of images have their own life cycles.
"Ninety percent of agencies using digital imaging are not in compliance with standards," Parsons said. "Anaheim is one of those on top of standards for controlling access, logging in who does what. There is a lot of liability out there if things get released."
The APD uses digital cameras with 8 million pixels of resolution. All photos have to be stored in their native resolution, without compression, to ensure that no tampering has been done, Conley said.
Each raw photo is about 66 Mbytes. To speed up officers' work, a working copy of each photo is also made at a reduced size of 12 Mbytes. Two copies of the raw photo and two copies of the working copy are stored, one each in the DIMS system and one off-site.
"Everything is duplicated off-site," Parsons said. "Disaster recovery is important. A lot of agencies haven't thought a lot about things like this."
Next: Custom-Built The server is a custom-built model based on Intel's quad-core processors. Linear Systems' software, which is based on a specialized Linux distribution tuned to image management, was just re-compiled to run on the quad-core, and is now being tested to work with dual quad-core processor servers.
The arrays are custom-built using a southern California-based system builder that Linear Systems declined to name, and include RAID controllers from QLogic Corp. (Aliso Viejo, Calif.) that can be configured for RAID 50 or RAID 60. "The builder uses a special power supply for us that can handle a high load with bigger mean time between failure," Monteros explained.
Linear is also modifying its software with a new module to handle the storage, retrieval and archiving of audio files to go with the digital photographs and other records, Monteros said.
When an officer returns from a crime scene with photos in a digital camera, those photos are downloaded using a DIMS Download Station, a workstation which like the DIMS storage system is built using industry-standard components. It includes a device that can read data from several types of memory cards as well as from USB devices.
Because of how DIMS stores photos and audits access to those photos, the only single point of failure in the Anaheim Police Station's digital archive is the CF or SP card in an officer's digital camera, Conley said.
"Once the card is plugged into the reader, we now have multiple copies of the images," he said. "And once the officer exits the system, the card is erased so the officer can't keep the image. He or she can't take the image home, or sell it."
Parsons said DIMS was designed so officers can use it without training. In fact, he said, the only really complicated part is the programming needed to ensure that the images are safely stored and that access is restricted.
"What's complicated is the chain of custody," he said. "It's taken us 14 years to develop. Anybody can do this for a small agency. But for a larger agency, it's extremely complicated."
The big difference between Linear Systems and other integrators is in how their products work with their customers, Conley said.
"Other vendors make us change to fit their systems," he said. "DIMS is changing to fit us."
The DIMS locks access to photos and audits the images in order to ensure the chain of custody and determine who accesses something that is extremely sensitive, Conley said. "This is very important for our Internal Affairs Division," he said.
Before the Anaheim Police Department implemented digital cameras and DIMS, it used an AGFA film processor.
The AGFA system is still in use for processing film for other local police departments who need help. However, Conley said, the APD has connected it to DIMS, and uses it mainly for printing photos and making CDs of photos for use in specific cases. "District Attorneys today are using PowerPoint for court cases," he said. "Everybody's going digital."
The department also uses an Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), a proprietary system from another integrator which can hold up to 800,000 fingerprint records and currently stores 300,000 records. Each record, which takes up about 2 Mbytes of storage, is made up of 14 images, including one roll for each of a suspect's 10 fingers, plus one "flat" of all four fingers pressed at once and a "flat" thumbprint for each hand.
Before AFIS, the Anaheim Police Department stored fingerprints on paper. The last paper record was added to this storage system in 2000. All the records here were scanned into AFIS starting in 1996.
Parsons looks at the AFIS, which is separate from his company's Digital Imaging Management System (DIMS), and sees future business possibilities.