New Orleans Real-Time Crime Center saves thousands of police hours

Key Takeaways

When a 911 call is made in New Orleans, the city’s Real-Time Crime Center pulls footage from cameras near the incident and sends it to law enforcement, making personnel better informed before arriving to the scene and cutting response times. The 24/7 centralized intelligence hub has access to more than 2,000 cameras across the city, according to Ross Bourgeois, director of Public Safety Support for the City of New Orleans, who manages the Real-Time Crime Center. County officials toured the facility at NACo’s Annual Conference on July 16.

The Real-Time Crime Center estimates that every time it provides video to officers, it saves 90 minutes in response time. Since opening in 2017, it’s given back “well over 60,000 man hours,” Bourgeois noted, adding that that’s a conservative estimate, and the number could be closer to double that. The center handles roughly 1,500 cases a month, he said.

“The sum of the parts is greater than the whole,” Bourgeois said. “What’s an hour to a homicide? What’s 20 minutes if you're looking for a lost kid? What’s 90 seconds if you can get an ambulance to a cardiac arrest patient during a major special event? 

“So, I would submit to you that it’s when seconds count and moments matter that you really can’t quantify [the benefit].”

The center is part of a $40 million citywide public safety initiative, funded through the city and Ernest N. Morial New Orleans Exhibition Hall Authority, that was rolled out following two high-profile shootings in November and December of 2016 around the French Quarter. 

“The tourism industry told the administration at the time ‘enough was enough,’” Bourgeois said.

It cost just under $10 million to build the Real-Time Crime Center and implement its technology to open by the one-year anniversary of the incidents, and the yearly operational budget is roughly $6 million, according to Bourgeois. 

A locality looking to adopt a similar model wouldn’t need to operate on that quick of a timeline or have as many resources to see results, he noted.

“I'm very proud of what we built here, but you don’t have to have a facility this size or this luxurious, if you will, for a government facility to do good work,” Bourgeois said. “You can do the basic tenets of a Real-Time Crime Center with one person, a laptop, a portable radio and one piece of technology … You can crawl before you walk and walk before you run.”

Despite significant backlash to local governments using cameras to monitor crime — from residents and privacy advocacy groups across the country — the Real-Time Crime Center’s “open book” approach has helped quell skepticism, according to Bourgeois. 

“I believe that a lot of our success and a lot of our acceptance has come from the fact that we’ll answer your questions and we’ll sit here and we’ll talk about it and we bring community groups through,” Bourgeois said. “And we have not seen that vitriolic pushback that other cities are having.”