The initiative, called Connect Fairfax County, will run through the department’s Real-Time Crime Center. Residents and business owners can use an online portal to register their cameras, which the department said will allow police to review a map of cameras that could hold evidence for detectives to review.

“Digital evidence is more and more important every day,” said Cpt. Hudson Bull, commander of the Real-Time Crime Center. “It is the best type of evidence that we can get in many of our cases.”

There are multiple levels of access camera owners can provide, Bull said. One option allows police to know the location of a camera and provides them with a phone number or email address that can be used. That option doesn’t provide access to the camera or information about the device.

“It just helps us know that there’s a camera at the location and your contact information so that we could reach out to you,” Bull said.

An alternative allows cameras to be integrated into the Real-Time Crime Center. Detectives there would then be able to view the camera feed in real time, “or you can set different levels where only if there’s a call for service do you grant access to the police department to that camera,” Bull said.

Just knowing the location of a camera that exists is helpful, Bull said, and over 50 registrants have provided the location of a camera that’s now on a police map.

“We’re able to correlate those locations to active calls for service, and if needed, we could reach out to those registrants and ask for possible digital evidence that they may have,” Bull said.

In the case of a missing person, Bull said officers may be searching and a helicopter or drone team may be used.

“The best piece of evidence that we can get, short of finding that person, is a video of that person in the area, so we can better relocate our search to where that person could be,” Bull said.

More information about how to register a camera is available online.

“The digital evidence leads the way in our investigations many times, and this will help us gather more digital evidence so that we can solve cases quickly,” he said.

 

The original article was posted here on February 6, 2025. Written by Scott Gelman | sgelman@wtop.com