The Los Angeles police department has introduced a new system to help them to deal with large scale disasters and attacks. The new programme, called LEEDIR was developed by the police department along with telecommunications entrepreneur George D.Crowley Jr. The software is designed to assist the authorities in sorting through video footage from events such as terrorist attacks, huge disasters and everyday street crime.

The usage of the software will be free to use for all law enforcement agencies during natural disasters, terrorist attacks and large scale criminal activity. It has been said that licensing the platform for the management of videos for everyday crimes will at some stage cost the police departments who use the system money.

The idea behind the technology came in the wake of the Boston Marathon attacks.  County Sherriff Lee Baca decided that he wanted to introduce a way to give police departments and other law-enforcement authorities a collaboration platform to be able to share and view investigation footage easily and quickly.

The Los Angeles police department met with many technology firms and decided to go with the Los Angeles based company SendUs for the construction and design of LEEDIR. Speaking about the technology George D. Crowley Jr said “In the wake of a calamitous event, police departments or other law-enforcement agencies can activate LEEDIR by calling an 800 number and filling out a web form. LEEDIR “can be activated in a number of minutes.”

He went on to explain that “Law enforcement and local media can then publicize a URL where citizen- and security-camera-shot video and photos of crimes can be uploaded by the public. LEEDIR transcodes those citizen-submitted photos and videos into readable formats, creates metadata databases, tags the photos and videos with values such as IP and email addresses, and organizes all that information in silos accessible to all law-enforcement agencies with jurisdiction.”

The need for this type of new system in the United States is clearly evident. Last month, when the Los Angeles police department had scheduled a press conference to unveil the ne LEEDIR programme, the press conference was cancelled when a mass shooting occurred at the Los Angeles Airport.  The new LEEDIR technology will prove to have significant benefits for all law enforcement agencies in the United States and will greatly assist then in the event of any future large scale disasters.