21 Century Crime Fighting: Behind The Scenes With The Anaheim PD

Page 1 of 2

Thanks to Linear Systems, a Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.-based systems integrator of digital image management solutions, one of the most advanced data storage and image management systems in the country now resides in Southern California, located at the Anaheim Police Department.

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

1 | 2 | Next >>

Tweet

   

More