Building a Real-time Information Center as a College or University

A growing trend across law enforcement is the introduction of Real-time Crime Centers (RTCCs). While you may have heard a few different names for these centers, the main purpose of all of them is the same: to help get you the information you need in real-time. These centers are now making their way into the higher education law enforcement world. Many in higher education law enforcement would love to have a RTCC, but the perceived costs and challenges involved often make it seem like an unattainable goal. Only those institutions with large budgets or fortunate enough to have grant funding can look to create their own center. So how do you as a higher education law enforcement professional continue to battle today’s changing safety challenges with a tight budget and limited access to today’s tools? Well that is what I am going to address in this article.  

From this point on, I am going to refer to these centers as Real-time Information Centers (RTICs) rather than Real-time Crime Centers (RTCCs). The reason is two-fold. Firstly, if you call your center a crime center, it communicates to the community that you are focusing on crime, which means you are focusing on whatever demographic happens to be involved in the crime. Secondly, these centers help with more than just crime. They help with missing persons, car accidents, medical emergencies, facilitation of information for Clery compliance, emergency planning, etc. For these reasons, I would suggest referring to a center with another name besides the word “crime".

When you think of a RTIC, a few notable images probably pop into your head: a room with low-lighting, a big LED sign of the department’s logo, an abnormally large table with big leather seats, fancy dispatcher stations with a bunch of monitors around them, and big TVs all around the room. I have toured my fair share of RTICs and I will be the first to say that those things are cool. However, I will also be the first person to say that you do not need any of those things. It is important to align once more on the purpose of an RTIC. It is to provide you with the information you need in real-time. None of those “cool” things that were just listed above help you get the information you need. Sure, some additional TVs/monitors can be beneficial in displaying more cameras and receiving alerts. But as long as you have a monitor or two, the right software(s), and a person to interact with the software, then you can turn a janitor’s closet into a real-time information center.



Budgets are tight across higher education and for the average institution, the thought of a RTIC is a far-fetched one. If your institution falls into this boat, it should be reassuring to hear that when considering how you are going to improve campus safety into the future, your first thought should not be about building a RTIC. Instead, your thought should be “how can I enable our team to obtain the information we need, when we need it”. If you achieve that by finding the funding to stand up your own real-time information center with all of the cool gadgets, that is awesome. If it means you simply get new software for your existing dispatch room, that is also awesome. I will shed some light on how you might be able to do that, but it is important to first explore what RTICs of traditional law enforcement agencies look like.



Let’s first look at centers at the state or county level. These centers will largely focus on supporting agencies around them by gathering and facilitating information. They will often examine crime trends, aggregate data such as gun violence statistics, and establish programs to foster collaboration between departments. Centers at the city or town level function a bit differently. They focus more directly on obtaining the information you need, when you need it (aka in real-time).  One of the main tools these centers use to obtain this real-time information are license plate recognition (LPR) cameras. A given center may utilize 100+ LPR cameras across their jurisdiction. The important thing to recognize is that sometimes, these centers will not have any normal “context” cameras (cameras that view sidewalks, roadways, inside of buildings, etc.) and if they do, there may only be a small number, perhaps a couple hundred. Naturally, the major city centers are an exception to this statement. The other main tool that these city/town centers use is software that pulls in cameras of other entities into their center (K-12 schools, residential homes, city buildings, hospitals, etc). The important thing to note is that while these centers can access the cameras of other entities, they are not responsible for the day-to-day incidents that occur on them and only use their cameras when a person of interest may have appeared on their cameras or in the event of an emergency.

Of course, colleges and universities are much different when compared to both state/county agencies and cities/towns. As higher education law enforcement, you have to deal with many more “context” cameras, have responsibilities both outdoor and indoor across the countless buildings on campus, and need to manage plenty of other systems such as access control, panic buttons, blue lights, mass notification systems, student shuttle busses, etc. Long story short, you deal with a lot more than you are given credit for. In my experience, there are two main obstacles that you need to overcome if you want to obtain the information you need in real-time. 1) Spending hours and hours trying to pull information from your large number of “context” cameras. 2) Wasting time attempting to deal with a bunch of siloed systems that are difficult to manage and do not work together.

Since the ability to clone yourself has not been discovered yet, how do you solve these problems? The answer lies in software that can do the hard work for you and quickly deliver the needed information. If you already knew where to find this software, you probably wouldn’t be reading this article right now. At this point, it is relevant to mention that we built our software to directly solve these problems. Are there other softwares that can help you? Absolutely. Will they solve the core problems that you face? Not without you and your team continuing to dedicate considerable time and resources. Most software applications in this space are sold to many different types of customers with vastly different environments, goals, and resources. We have uniquely built our software for and with the participation of campus law enforcement agencies. MIDL is the only dedicated platform to enable your campus law enforcement team to obtain the information you need in real-time. Whether this is accomplished by serving as the software backbone to your very own RTIC or by simply enhancing your existing dispatch, our software will be a force multiplier for your team.