As of this writing, the feeds from 1,445 surveillance cameras throughout Orlando are instantly accessible by police — with businesses and residents able to contribute on-demand or real-time footage via a platform called Fusus.
“The FususCORE hardware device that citizens can connect to their home or business network enables a user’s camera system to instantly connect with the cloud to share relevant video with law enforcement,” said Chief Digital Officer Matt Garrepy of Orlando-based Solodev, a cloud technology expert who is not involved with the Orlando Police Department or Fusus.
In other words, with your permission, police can view the world through your surveillance cameras.
How the cloud factors in
For the uninitiated, the cloud is a network of servers that operate as a unified ecosystem. It’s vast and invisible, and without it, many of the computing functions people are used to wouldn’t happen. What’s more, emerging technologies wouldn’t exist. Technology relies on and produces data, and there must be a place to store all that data. One of those places is the cloud.
What is the Orlando Police Department doing with all the data collected from integrated cameras? Looking at it. Though technically, The Fusus AI model is looking at it first.
An operative in the Crime Center at the Orlando Police Department’s South Street headquarters uses the Fusus system software to search for specifics, choosing a time span, radius and keywords associated with a suspect, for example.
The software uses AI to curate the content harvested from registered and integrated cameras throughout the city, refining all that to a series of 30-second clips that best match the search.
Garrepy, a cloud expert and Amazon Web Services partner, said the cloud is what makes this possible. “Law enforcement wouldn’t be able to achieve this level of connectivity without a scalable underlying infrastructure – it would be too costly to build and manage. By leveraging the cloud, Fusus is making it feasible to realize a new level of community data crowdsourcing to solve and even prevent crimes.”
How Fusus came to Orlando
“You find when you operate one of these centers that just about every one of these software companies has a product, [and] when they hear you're rolling, they're like, ‘Hey, can we come in and demo a product with you?' ” said OPD Captain Frank Nunez. “I usually get about one to two pitches a week.”
Nunez said he and his boss review options and ultimately city commissioners decide if they think the Crime Center needs the product or service in question.
In June 2021, the Orlando City Council approved the use of Fusus and in September 2022, OPD rolled out Orlando Connect. The annual subscription for the program is $100,000, and the first annual contract was signed Oct. 11, 2021. On top of that, there are equipment costs. According to records provided by Orlando Police Department, it has paid $359,000 to Fusus since November 2021.
There are two levels of participation: You register your security cameras with Orlando Connect, and a police investigator will contact you via email if they need your assistance solving a crime near you. The number of registered cameras in Orlando is 3,616. The integration level is a step up, and it costs money.
The price tag ranges from $350 to $7,300 for hardware (a transmission box about the size of a DVR) and an annual subscription. That’s right — business owners and residents have paid to facilitate police access to their camera feeds, even though there’s no guarantee of enhanced police protection for those who share their camera feeds.
Detective James Gardner likened Orlando Connects to insurance. “We hope we never have to use it, but we pay that money every month to our car insurance people. And it's kind of the same thing here. Hopefully the police don't have to access your cameras, but in the event that we are responding to stuff in your area, that's the way we're going to be able to probably respond more effectively to things.”
Fusus in action
Last year, downtown Orlando business owner John Sanfillipo of Foundation Presents heard a story about a theft suspect: “A guy they thought stole someone's cell phone out in front of Taco Bell, they were able to track this person by cameras through downtown to Creative Village, where he got off a bus.”
Here's what Gardner said happened that day last fall:
“A detective came to me [about] a case where somebody reported they were robbed in a particular area of town, and they gave me a seven- or eight-block radius. Within that, I had 12-15 cameras, and I knew a description of a bicycle and a color of a shirt the person was wearing. So, I could loop those cameras up basically using the AI in the system there. I had a six-hour window for about 12 cameras, which is 72 hours of footage. The program reduced that to less than an hour of matching footage using AI.”
After successfully tracking the suspect via Fusus AI, he handed off his findings to another department.
Is Fusus data secure?
For residents sharing their content with police, privacy is going to be a central question, Garrepy said.
“Based on the city’s site, it’s made clear that users and businesses will have control over their access policy, and law enforcement won’t be able to monitor live streams. From what I can see, Fusus is an AWS Select Technology Partner with a public sector focus, so they could be leaning on Amazon’s scalability and hosted resources to manage their services."
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