Police to get access to 20,000 CCTV cameras in plan to upgrade Victoria Police Monitoring and Assessment Centre
LIVE vision from up to 20,000 CCTV cameras in town and suburban centres statewide would be streamed to a New York-style police tech hub in a major security revamp.
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LIVE vision from up to 20,000 CCTV cameras in town and suburban centres statewide would be streamed to a hi-tech police hub in a major security revamp.
Victoria Police is considering the move as part of an expansion of its New York-style surveillance centre, created in the wake of the Moomba riots.
The $15 million centre, which opened on New Year’s Eve 2016, currently only extends to cameras within metropolitan Melbourne.
Assistant Commissioner Deb Abbott told the Sunday Herald Sun: “Victoria Police is always looking for ways to enhance service and leverage off the latest technology, and this includes utilising the services and technology currently available at regional police stations such as local CCTV feeds.”
“Victoria Police has and will continue to explore any and all options to expand the VP MAC (Victoria Police Monitoring and Assessment Centre) model as we do for all of technologies and service.”
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The community should be reassured CCTV footage would be used responsibly to enhance safety, Ms Abbott said.
An article in Victoria Police’s Police Life magazine states the expansion would involve the centre being in up to four locations instead of its sole site at Docklands.
The additional cameras would mostly include council-operated units in key public areas like main streets and transit hubs.
The proposal is linked to the acquisition of “big data analytical tools” which would alert the force to an incident which could then be monitored in real-time through up to 20,000 CCTV feeds.
The monitoring and assessment centre has 26 dedicated staff and is supervised by a senior sergeant and two intelligence officers.
They can also access information from the police air wing, state control centre and monitor social media which troublemakers used to make plans before unleashing mayhem at Moomba in 2015.
The centre operates around-the-clock and was used to monitor more than 1000 events in its first year of operation.
Ms Abbott said the force as yet had no specific changes to announce and did not comment on specific capabilities of the assessment centre.
“Since becoming operational in January 2017, the VP MAC has proved extremely effective in aiding frontline police to detect and deter crime across the state,’’ she said.
“The VP MAC analyses up-to-the second intelligence gleaned from a variety of sources which allows police to deploy officers in the right place, at the right time.”